


Even In Another Time

by Hila_Shahar



Category: Star Trek, Star Trek: Discovery
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, BAMF Sylvia Tilly, Bisexual Michael, Bisexual Sylvia Tilly, F/F, Friends to Lovers, Hurt/Comfort, Jett Reno's wife is not dead, Long Live The Lesbians!, Major Character Injury, Multi, Post-Season/Series 02, Presumed Dead, Reunions, Season/Series 02 Spoilers, Temporary Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-24
Updated: 2020-02-06
Packaged: 2021-02-27 10:34:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 14
Words: 27,608
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22385737
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hila_Shahar/pseuds/Hila_Shahar
Summary: Set after Discovery Season 2 finale.930 years in the future, the crew finds a long-abandoned Klingon ship adrift in space, and Reno and Tilly go over to raid it for parts. While on board, Reno gets seriously injured, and they discover a room full of cryotubes containing prisoners from the Klingon war. Including one woman who looks very familiar...
Relationships: Jett Reno/Jett Reno's Spouse, Michael Burnham/Sylvia Tilly
Comments: 54
Kudos: 69





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Now complete.
> 
> Thanks for reading!

As the last red signal faded from view, the expanse of deep space outside the starship’s hull was empty, silent, and still. 

Inside, _Discovery_ ’s bridge was a hub of activity. 

“Captain,” Bryce said, bracing himself on the surface of his station as he turned to face Saru in the captain's chair. “We’re flying in the dark. Do you want me to open a channel and start hailing?”

“There’d be no point,” Owosekun interrupted, laser-focused on the screens in front of her. “We’re the only ship around. Wait …”

She trailed off, working so quickly her braids smacked her shoulders when she moved.

“Lieutenant Owosekun?” Saru prompted, prepared to give the order to raise shields.

The operations officer stared at her screens for another moment, then faced the captain’s chair.

“No, nothing, Captain,” she said. “For a moment, there appeared to be another ship’s signature on the aft short-range sensors, but it’s gone now. The energy required to close the wormhole must be interfering with our systems.”

A metallic clatter came from underneath Detmer’s station, and the pilot herself slid out a moment later, screwdriver gripped between her teeth. She magnetized the tool and stuck it to the augmentation on her temple, then turned to look out the aft window. 

“You said it’s on the short-range sensors?” she asked. “At that distance, if there was anything out there, we could see it!”

The turbolift doors hissed open. Nilsson was first out and ran back to her station, still ready for battle. She was followed by Michael Burnham, sweaty and shivering but standing firm without the Red Angel suit. Dr. Pollard and Jett Reno were right behind her.

Reno broke into slow applause when Michael stopped beside the captain’s chair, and the rest of the bridge crew followed suit. Michael did not meet anybody’s eyes, and Saru knew that even his Vulcan-raised friend must be overwhelmed by the unexpected attention.

“All right!” Saru shouted over din. “That’s enough for now – Commander Burnham has done an extraordinary thing, and she will receive the honors she deserves in due course, but for now we need to focus on our next steps. Lieutenant Bryce, begin hailing on all channels – Starfleet cloaking and shielding techniques may have become more advanced since we traveled, so just because we can’t see any ships doesn’t mean they can’t see us.”

“Aye, Captain,” Bryce said, turning to work.

Saru nodded.

“Lieutenant Owosekun, beginning with the obvious, where are we?” he asked.

Owosekun grinned – she was very much in her element as a navigator.

“I’m picking up Terralysium on the long-range scanners, but it’s just on the edge of what I can see,” she said as she worked to sharpen the signal. “Hold on – interference – but I’ve got as clear a signal as I can, and it’s still far off.”

The turbolift doors opened hissed open again.

“Michael!” Tilly yelped, barreling into her friend and scooping her into an enormous hug. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you! I was in sickbay, but no one saw you come through there – which is good, that’s really good, I’m so glad you’re not hurt. You’re not hurt, are you? Because I’m going to be really mad if you’re hurt and didn’t go to sickbay. No? Okay – great! And then I went to our quarters, but of course you’re not there, I knew you’d have to be in the middle of everything. So then I heard that everyone was up here, so I figured you might be here too…”

She trailed off as she finally realized that the officers had gone silent and every eye was on her. Tilly gulped.

“Sorry,” she said, letting go of Michael forcing her shoulders back. “I’m glad you’re okay. Well – are you okay? I mean, you just saved the universe. And we’re in the future...”

Michael gave a wan smile.

“It is very good to see you, Tilly,” she said, taking her hand. “I am relieved that you, too, are unharmed.”

Detmer cleared her throat.

“This distance between us and Terralysium is going to be a problem,” she said, giving the station behind her a loving kick. “None of the engines are responding.”

“Yeah, because engineering got bashed around like a loose communicator in a turbolift shaft when we went through the wormhole,” Reno reported, rubbing her temples. The engineer was pale and seemed much the worse for wear after her experience with the time crystal, but her sardonic tone was unchanged. “This isn’t normal warp-speed wear and tear, if you haven’t noticed; this is time travel. I’m amazed we’ve still got life support and most of our critical systems – she’s a damn good ship – but if you pull up those scans – Nilsson?”

The officer’s screen lit up red with damage reports from the engineering bay.

“Long story short, it’s all fried,” Reno interpreted. “Warp and impulse engines are going to need some serious replacement parts before they’re flying us anywhere.”

“The spore drive and transporters are offline, too,” Nilsson added.

“So, for the time being, we must remain where we are,” Saru summarized.

The officers nodded.

“That might … not be a bad thing,” Pollard muttered, barely looking up from her PADD for long enough to acknowledge the conversation that was going on around here.

“Doctor Pollard?” Saru prompted, inviting her to continue.

Pollard ignored him until she finished the messages she was sending, then looked up.

“Sickbay is overwhelmed,” she said, though her blood-spattered uniform would have told the tale even if she hadn't. “I don’t have a firm number on casualties – I want to open up the robo-surgery suites to get more people in treatment, but we’re going to need power.”

“So…” Saru said.

“So I need you to reroute all the power you can spare to me in sickbay,” Pollard commanded.

Saru furrowed his brow.

“You could have asked for this over the comms,” he said. “You didn’t need to come in person when you are needed elsewhere.”

“I needed to convey the urgency of the situation,” Pollard explained with false calm. “I can save more lives by getting those units online than I could doing anything else right now, and I need a full report on our status so I can triage. What I don't need is someone simply telling me to ‘do the best I can’ without doing everything _they_ can to make that happen.”

“Well, yes, of course,” Saru said. “Lieutenant Nilsson, redirect everything you can spare to sickbay without affecting communications, sensors, or life support.”

Nilsson turned to the wide screen in front of her and began rerouting all the power still leeching into _Discovery_ ’s damaged systems to sickbay.

“If we get lucky, Starfleet will find us soon,” Bryce said as he adjusted his signal frequencies. “It’s been nearly a thousand years; they must have come up with all kinds of medical breakthroughs that they could give us.”

“No!” exclaimed Michael, Tilly, and Nilsson all at once.

“The sphere data is not safe yet,” Michael explained. “Until we get it down on the surface of Terralysium, even if we do encounter another Starfleet ship, we cannot allow any sort of data transfer between them and us.”

“It’s too dangerous,” Detmer agreed.

Tilly seemed poised to say something else, but full-stopped and changed tacks instantly.

“Hey, how come you have a wrench on your face?” she asked.

Detmer smiled and tapped her temple.

“Didn’t you get the memo?” she quipped. “Magnetized augmentations are the latest futuristic fashion – where's yours?”

Everyone but Owosekun laughed, if only to relieve the tension, but the operations officer was still glued to her screen, fingers flying.

“I’ve got a question,” Reno said, raising her hand and speaking before anyone could even think to call on her. “Has anyone actually checked that we’re in the same universe as before?”

Michal furrowed her brow – an expression that made her look like the spitting image of her adoptive father, though they both would have been quick to point out the impossibility of any sort of genetic similarity.

“Travel between universes would not be consistent with the normal operating parameters of the suit,” Michael said, and it was obvious from her tone that she was running the calculations in her head as she spoke. “Given that I did not experience any abnormalities in piloting –”

“ – Other than being in the middle of a literal war zone, and also bringing a whole ship into the future – “ Tilly interrupted.

“But nothing that would suggest that we had moved outside the confines of our own universe,” Michael finished. “Without more data, it is impossible to be certain, but I have no reason to believe that that is the case.”

“Can we run scans?” Reno asked with uncharacteristic urgency. “Just to see if anything weird comes up?”

“Commander, do you have reason to believe that we are not in our own universe?” Saru asked.

“Oh, because that’s definitely an unreasonable question when we’ve just dragged _Discovery_ through a wormhole using a copy of an experimental prototype suit that was built in a couple hours while being shot at,” she fired back after only a moment’s hesitation. “No offence, Burnham.”

“None taken,” the officer responded with Vulcan tact.

“All of the basic metrics seem to be in line with what we would expect them to have become in a thousand years,” Nilsson reported from her station. “If we are in another universe, it would have to be incredibly similar to ours; practically identical, mathematically speaking.”

Reno’s face twitched, but a loud chime from Owosekun’s station called attention back to the operations officer.

“What’s going on, Joann?” Detmer asked, leaning over to get a better look at her colleague’s screens.

“I’m not sure,” Owosekun responded. “But it appears that the brief disturbance I noticed earlier was not an artifact; it has now reappeared multiple times, and it is increasing in frequency.”

“Shields up, Captain?” Nilsson asked.

Saru shook his head.

“Not yet, lieutenant,” he ordered. “Until we have evidence that this entity poses any danger, continue diverting power to sickbay.”

“The readings are clearing up,” Owosekun said. “Captain, the artifact appears to be a Klingon ship.”

“Appears to be?” Saru asked.

“It’s phasing in and out; I think their cloaking device is malfunctioning,” she explained. “And there it goes. It’s fully decloaked. I’m scanning it now, but I don’t believe it is hostile; their shields are down, and I’m seeing no life signs on board.”

“Did I pull this through the wormhole with us?” Michael asked.

“I don’t think so…” Detmer muttered as she used the few undamaged screens remaining at her station to begin running scans of her own. “The ship is from our time – a millennium ago. Wow. That’s weird to say – but it’s got a lot more wear and tear on it, even accounting for wormhole travel. The only way it got here is at one second per second.”

“It’s been drifting all this time?” Reno asked.

Owosekun nodded.

“It’s an incredible specimen,” the navigator said with more than a touch of reverence in her voice. “Its life support systems appear to have sustained severe damage, but all of the ship’s basic structures are in amazingly good condition under the circumstances.”

“ _All_ their basic structures?” Tilly piped up, turning her head fast enough to give everybody whiplash.

“As far as I can tell,” Owosekun said, pointing at the relevant information on the scans so that Tilly could confirm for herself.

“Well, that’s great news!” the ensign grinned, practically bouncing on her feet. “I mean – _Discovery_ can’t fly to Terralysium until we fix the engines, and Starfleet isn’t answering us, if there even is a Starfleet anymore, but this ship is a full-on Klingon hardware store that just materialized out of thin air. How cool is that?”

“We could take a shuttle over and raid it for parts,” Reno agreed. “They won’t be pretty repairs, but I don’t do this for the beauty contests.”

“We must still have a few functioning shuttles,” Detmer nodded.

“And their engineering materials will be mostly compatible with our systems, given that the Klingon ship dates from a similar time period,” Saru said.

“I’ll get my toolbox,” Reno said.

When Saru gave her a look – a very clear _did I assign you to this mission?_ – the commander shrugged.

“Most senior currently conscious engineer,” she said, answering the unspoken question. Saru nodded in assent.

“I’ll come with you,” Michael volunteered.

Doctor Pollard looked up from her PADD for long enough to give a dry laugh.

“Not a chance, Commander Burnham,” the doctor said. “After everything you’ve just done, I wouldn’t be performing my duties if I didn’t make you stop and rest before embarking on another mission – doctor’s orders.”

“I am fine,” Michael lied instantly.

Doctor Pollard sighed.

“Michael,” she said. “You know you’re not at your best; you need to stop for a minute before something stops you. Besides, I don’t want to have to explain to your mother how I allowed you to keep pushing yourself for no good reason. Telling her why we put you at risk to get to her was bad enough.”

Pollard’s face was a little bit murderous; she had never quite forgiven any of the people involved in allowing one of her crew members to be used as bait to trap the Red Angel, and probably never would.

“And the more time you spend convincing me, the less time you are spending with patients,” Michael surmised, a series of emotional expressions passing over her face before she masked them all.

“Precisely,” Pollard said, beckoning Michael towards the turbolift.

“Then it appears I have no choice,” she muttered, though it sounded like more of an instinctive protest than actual resistance.

As the lift doors closed, Saru felt distinctly relieved to know that his friend was being cared for.

“Tilly,” Reno said, motioning for the ensign. “With me. Get your training hours in.”

Tilly leapt across the room so fast that she nearly tripped over her shoes.

“Sure thing, commander,” she said. “Absolutely. I’m right here, all the way. I mean, if the captain’s okay with it?”

“Indeed,” Saru nodded. “Two engineers are better than one, and I do not foresee any significant risk inherent in this mission, given that the ship has been abandoned for hundreds of years.”

“We may have some trouble communicating with you once you’re off _Discovery_ ,” Bryce added. “The interference from the wormhole closing is going to insert some noise into short-range communications until it dissipates, so it might take a few tries for a message to get through.”

“Will that interfere with communication between evac suits?” Reno asked. “We’ve got no life support over there, so we’re going to need them until we sort that out.”

“I don’t think so,” Bryce said. “Ship-wide communication is working, so short distances don’t seem to pose a problem.”

“Then that’s fine,” the engineer said, rubbing her temples. “I was getting tired of hearing everyone chatting all the damn time anyways. Come on, Tilly, we’ve got parts to raid.”

Tilly froze, waiting for someone to point out how the commander had said that she was tired of chatter and yet had picked her to join the salvage mission, but when no one took the bait, she hurried to catch up and raced into the turbolift right behind Reno. 

As the remaining bridge crew continued their tasks and repairs, Saru stared out the bridge window at the Klingon ship. Fully visible now, and absolutely still, it sat in the lower left quadrant of his field of vision like a behemoth.

“Captain, I’m clearing the shuttle for departure,” Detmer said. “Reno, Tilly, you’re good to go.”

“Good,” Saru said. “Continue monitoring their progress, Detmer; I want to know when they reach the ship.”

His order was nearly drowned out by a piercing electronic yowl that made everyone but Detmer flinch.

“Sorry!” Bryce shouted over the noise. “I’m filtering it now.”

In thirty seconds, he had turned the shriek into quieter, staticky words.

“Unidentified historical vessel, this is the U.S.S. _Cornwell_. Keep your shields down and prepare to be boarded.”


	2. Chapter 2

“Was this really the best we could get?” Reno asked, looking around their shuttle’s dingy interior.

Tilly kept her hands on the controls but followed the engineer’s gaze – it was true, this shuttle had been dated even before they time traveled, and most of its systems were held together by prayers and spit-and-glue fixes.

“It was in the repair dock when we went through the wormhole – that protected it from most of the turbulence,” Tilly explained. “Captain Pike was going to decommission it, but Detmer got him to reassign it to her instead; she's been experimenting with some really cool shields that are supposed to interfere with all kinds of scanners – almost like a cloaking device, but built into the structure of the ship, so it doesn’t take any power to operate.”

Tilly could have said more about the plans that Detmer had in store for her current favorite piece of space junk, or how she suspected that Detmer’s decision to work on new shielding technology was at least partially intended to impress a certain operations officer, but with the Klingon ship coming into full view, she was more interested in trying to see the inscription on the side.

“If I’m reading right, it’s called the _BaS ‘elth_ ,” she sounded out, working her way around the Klingon letters.

“Metal blade,” Reno said.

“You know it?” Tilly asked.

Reno shook her head.

“Translated.”

“Since when do you speak Klingon?” Tilly asked.

“I don’t, really,” Reno shrugged. “Marta – my wife - was a linguist. I helped her study Klingon culture when the war started, but that’s it. It’s like how she fixed the replicator in our quarters when it broke down the week after I got transferred to the _Hiawatha_ – you can only be with someone for so long before you start picking up on the things they do.”

A quiet hiss came over the shuttle’s comms, but when nothing clearer followed, Tilly chalked it up to the interference Bryce had warned them about.

“Well, it’s not exactly the friendliest name they could have chosen,” she said as she began docking maneuvers. “Not that I’d really expect a Klingon ship to be friendly. But maybe that’s not fair – it’s been hundreds of years since we popped out of the universe’s timeline. Maybe Klingons _are_ really friendly now, and I just sound super bigoted.”

“Mm-hmm,” Reno said. “Ready to steal some hardware?”

Tilly tapped the helmet on her evac suit, sliding it closed, and Reno did the same.

“Ready,” she said as the shuttle came to a full stop and the doors creaked open.

The interior of the Klingon ship was dark, the emergency lights having burned out long ago, but Tilly magnetized her boots to the deck, tossed a couple of lamps in what she hoped was an upwards direction – it was hard to tell without the artificial gravity – and allowed them to activate, bathing the abandoned chamber in a clinical white glow. Long, dark shadows drifted across the light sources, making the room seem to ripple as though they were underwater. 

“Woah,” Tilly gasped, and though she did not hear a word over her communicators, when she looked over at Jett, she could see the same expression reflected in the engineer’s eyes.

Tilly had managed to dock their shuttle in a part of the ship that appeared to have been a sort of lab, or maybe a testing facility – half the stations were full of partially-constructed equipment that seemed to have been abandoned mid-task.

“This is...” Tilly continued, reaching out for the nearest sharp implement before remembering where – and when – she was, and pulling her hand back with a wheezing laugh.

“What?” Reno asked.

“Well, I was going to say, this is state-of-the-art,” Tilly admitted. “But - of course it’s not. It’s almost a thousand years old. It keeps not feeling real that we’ve time traveled, at least to me. Maybe it feels more real to you? Anyways, it’s some of the coolest stuff I’ve ever seen, and it’s ancient.”

“By that standard, so are we,” Reno said.

“Maybe you,” Tilly said, teasing just like she would with one of her friends before remembering that Reno definitely and meaningfully outranked her. “I mean, yes, commander. Absolutely. Sorry.”

Reno did not give a response over the communicators, but the way her shoulders twitched made Tilly wonder if she had turned off her microphone and was laughing in her helmet.

“What do you think all these devices _are_?” Tilly asked, gesturing at the room. Given time, she was confident that she could reverse-engineer most of it, but her first impressions weren’t giving her much to go on.

“Weapons tech,” Reno replied grimly, not laughing anymore. “The Klingons must have been working on developing more advanced versions for their standard arsenal.”

“So how come so many stations are empty?” Tilly asked without missing a beat.

Reno thought about it for a moment.

"Not everything here could be used to build weapons – some if it is just your standard non-lethal research,” she said. “If I had to guess, I’d say it was some sort of research vessel that got repurposed for the war effort.”

“Just like _Discovery_ ,” Tilly said, thinking about how it had only taken four or five shift cycles once the war broke out for her shipside home to change from a science vessel into something halfway unrecognizable.

Something in the corner of the room caught Tilly’s eye, and she walked over, almost losing her balance when her boots made her walk more slowly than she wanted to.

“Hey, I recognize this!” she said, pointing at the humanoid-sized cylinder that was standing with its door hanging half off its hinges, revealing the mechanisms inside. “Well … sort of …"

She was trying not to touch anything she didn’t fully understand, but she could not resist leaning in close to get a better look at the circuits that made up the interior of the machine.

“From where?” Reno asked, coming up behind her. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Tilly bit down hard on her tongue like she had always been taught to do to stop herself from talking when she shouldn’t, then remembered that Stamets had told Reno about all the classified things _Discovery_ had been up to once she had started asking perceptive questions.

“Ugh,” she said, swallowing her spit. “Blood tastes awful. I keep forgetting that. My point is, that looks a lot like one of the agonizers we saw in the mirror universe.”

Reno hesitated.

“Stamets mentioned these,” she said, running her hands closer to the abandoned controls than even Tilly would have dared. “Does this mean we're … there?”

Tilly felt a shock of dread at remembering the place and what it had made of the other version of herself, but when she glanced at Reno, she could have sworn that the engineer seemed hopeful. Maybe because she had never been there herself.

“No, commander, I don’t think so,” Tilly said. “This machine has similar specs to the agonizers in the mirror universe where I definitely never want to go again, and it looks like it operates in fairly similar ways, not like I memorized the protocols in case I’d have to torture anyone to keep up my disguise and make sure I didn’t get the whole crew killed, but it’s not exactly the same. I’m thinking it’s more likely that this was a case of parallel evolution. People – or Klingons, sorry - who want to hurt other people are pretty good at finding the most efficient ways to do it in any universe.”

Reno gave a terse nod.

“Right,” she said. “I’m going to find the engine room.”

The engineer had already demagnetized one boot and turned away before Tilly was prepared to catch up with her.

“Commander?” Tilly asked over the comms as Reno marched into the heart of the ship, trailing one of the lamps behind her in midair. “What do you want me to do?”

“Get the life support back online,” Reno answered without breaking pace. “Have you ever tried to strip a warp cell with gloves on? We’re going to need to ditch the suits.”

By the time Reno was out of sight, Tilly had made her way to one of the less crowded – and therefore probably less deadly – stations. It only took her a few minutes to use the auxiliary power cell from her suit to get the monitor online, and less time than that to route the interface through her universal translator so that she could start analyzing the damage reports.

She sent a quick series of commands, but the station only responded by trying to shock her with a spray of sparks from the dying electronics.

She tried again – more slowly this time, controlling the rate of input – and now she was able to see that the main damage to the ship’s life-support systems had not come from a sweeping and destructive attack, but instead from a much more targeted strike on a single critical regulatory network housed somewhere in the lower decks. When that went down, the Klingons would have had only seconds to react as their breathable air leached out into space and gravity failed.

“Damn,” she muttered appreciatively. She didn’t know who had done it, but this was an elegant bit of engineering sabotage. And this would have been way too deep in a ship full of war-ready Klingons for the Federation to send an agent – well, Michael and Ash had taken a similarly risky mission to plant their sensors on board the flagship, but no actual Federation captain would ever have approved it. So maybe it was a prisoner? Or a Klingon mutineer?

With time and breathable air on her side, Tilly was easily able to do what the former occupants of this ship could not, and rerouted life support through backup channels. The ship gave a moan like a dying Terran whale, and Tilly remembered what Michael had told her about the mission where poor Airiam died and ducked under her station as the frozen bodies came crashing down.

“That sounds promising,” Reno’s dry voice said over the comms. “And the Klingon popsicle that that just about fell on top of me tells me that we’ve got gravity.”

“Sorry, sorry,” Tilly said, pulling herself out from under the table. “I should have warned you about that. Anyways, I'll adjust the systems to human parameters for us, and double-check these backups in case any more systems crash.”

“Nice work, Ensign,” Reno said.

And though Tilly was not planning on saying anything, she still silenced her communicator so that there was no chance of Reno somehow hearing her grin.

The happier she was, the faster she wanted to work, so she had to keep reminding herself that this cutting-edge Klingon technology was basically a museum piece and had to be handled carefully. Eventually, once the external oxygen levels were rising and air filtration had stabilized, Tilly opened the visor on her helmet and demagnetized her boots.

“Commander Reno?” she said, choking a little on the dusty air. “You can take off your suit now.”

The commander didn’t say anything, but Tilly heard an awful hiss over the comms as Reno slid her visor up as well.

“Should I meet you at the engines?” Tilly asked.

“Not right now, Tilly,” Reno replied, brushing off the question before Tilly had even finished saying it. “I just …"

Reno cried out, and a low alarm began wailing through the ship.

“Commander Reno?” Tilly asked. “Are you okay? Because that sounded _really_ concerning for a second, and I’m sure it’s nothing and you’re fine, but if it is something …"

There was no interruption, and no reply.

Tilly took off running.

She only paused at the edge of the chamber to turn back and grab the sharpest, meanest-looking Klingon weapon she thought she could figure out how to use, then raced headlong into the heart of the ship.


	3. Chapter 3

The corridors on the _BaS ‘elth_ were compact and streamlined by Klingon standards (so, winding and cavernous) but Tilly ignored the distracting architecture and focused on the mechanical details that all subtly pointed her in the direction of the engine room. She almost ran right past an open chamber before skidding to a stop in the doorway. The room was glowing – Reno's light!

She stepped into the space, brandishing her borrowed weapon in front of her.

“This is Ensign Sylvia Tilly of the U.S.S. _Discovery_ ,” she announced, wishing that her name sounded more threatening. “I should warn you I’m armed with … this thing, and very, _very_ dangerous, and I really like Commander Reno, so if there’s anybody here, you should probably surrender right now.”

Something on Tilly’s left made a sound, almost like a cough.

“Commander?” she asked, carefully making her way between the large, strange pods that had been placed at regular intervals throughout the chamber as she tried to track the sound. Parts of them were covered in some sort of glass, which reflected the light and made it hard to see, and small dials were blinking left and right. “Is that you?”

“Tilly,” a voice rasped.

She looked down to find the engineer collapsed on the floor beside one of the pods, the front of her evac suit dripping blood.

“Oh my God,” Tilly gasped, dropping to her knees beside the engineer as her weapon clattered to the deck.

Reno gave her a squinting once-over.

“What the hell are you doing with a _tajtlq_ , ensign?” she asked, trying to point at the blade but wincing at the movement.

“I thought you might be in trouble,” Tilly answered quickly. “I mean, you are, definitely, but not the kind of trouble I necessarily thought… Commander, what happened? How bad is it? Can you move?”

Reno gave a tight shake of her head.

“Here’s a command training lesson for you,” she quipped. “Never mess around with Klingon hardware. Damn thing tried to impale me.”

“It looks like it did sort of impale you,” Tilly corrected, eyeing the metal spike that was sticking out of Reno’s abdomen. “If you hadn’t been wearing your evac suit … anyways, we need to get you out of here.”

“No!” Reno said, and grasped at Tilly’s sleeve. The effort only made her bleed harder, and her hair was terrifyingly dark plastered against her waxy face.

“Okay, good point, I should try to stabilize you a little before we move you, okay?” Tilly asked, shedding the top of her own evac suit. “I’m not going to take this spike out – we'll let med bay deal with that when we get there – but I’m going to do my best. Um … this is probably going to hurt. A lot, I’m guessing. I know, I have to, but … I’m sorry.”

Reno didn’t say a word, just pressed her lips together and nodded.

Tilly used the stolen weapon to cut bandages from her uniform, deeply regretting that these suits didn’t come with any useful sort of first-aid kit. Careful not to jostle the spike, Tilly wound the bandages around it and pressed down, then guided Reno to continue applying pressure so that she could get one hand free.

Still watching the commander for any new sign of distress, she reached for her communicator.

“Tilly to _Discovery_ ,” she said on the open channel, speaking extra-clearly in case of interference.

“ _Discovery_ to away team,” the response came almost immediately, and in an unfamiliar voice. “Return to your shuttle at once. Do not bring any artifacts from the Klingon vessel with you.”

Tilly frowned.

“Hang on a second, who the hell are you?” she demanded. “Reno’s hurt – I need to talk to Captain Saru or Doctor Pollard. Please.”

Politeness jumped off her tongue as an afterthought, and it showed.

“I am Captain Zix of the U.S.S. _Cornwell_ ,” the voice said sharply. “Pursuant to Starfleet regulation, I have taken command of the unidentified historical vessel calling itself _Discovery_ until my crew and I can determine who you are and what needs to be done with you. Away team, you are under orders to return to your ship immediately. I need to see your shuttle in the air within five minutes, or I will be forced to activate quarantine procedures.”

“You _really_ don’t have to convince me – Commander Reno got attacked by some of the Klingon tech and we have to get her to sickbay,” Tilly said. “Wait. What do you mean, quarantine procedures? She got stabbed, not infected.”

“Starfleet has documented three separate cases of crew members encountering lethal pathogens aboard degrading Klingon wartime specimens,” Zix explained. “We believe they were developing biological weapons, so all likely Klingon relics from that period have been quarantined until further notice.”

Tilly put her communicator down and tried to help Reno up to lean against the pod but was pushed away.

“What’s wrong, commander?” Tilly asked. “I mean, other than the giant spike in the front of your evac suit, obviously. But we’re going to get you back to the ship, and Doctor Pollard will patch you up, and then we’ll find another way to get to Terralysium and dump the data. Everything’s going to be okay, okay?”

“I don’t see any life signs moving, Ensign,” Zix said over the communicator. “My ship has no unmanned shuttles, and I can’t transport you out – the interference in this sector is preventing us from getting a lock on your signals – so you’re going to have to fly yourselves.”

“Give me a minute,” Tilly snapped as she attempted to manhandle the unwilling engineer to her feet without doing her any more damage.

“I’m already bending the rules for you, Ensign,” Zix responded in the same tone. “Every second you spend on that ship means a risk of infection coming back to your crew and mine. I’d rather not abandon you two, but if you don’t get moving now, I won’t have a choice.”

With a great effort, Reno grabbed the communicator out of Tilly’s hand.

“I'm not going,” she rasped, leaning all her weight on Tilly to keep herself upright.

“Of course we’re going,” Tilly corrected with a nervous laugh. “Look - it’s not that far back to the shuttle -”

“Sorry, Tilly,” Reno said, but she was talking directly into the communicator. “Look in the pods – there are people in there. These are cryotubes. I can’t leave without them.”

“Ignore her, Ensign,” Zix said urgently. “Get yourselves to the shuttle. If what she says is true, we’ll deal with it later.”

“Can’t,” Reno said, struggling for breath. “ _Discovery_ … the wormhole interference … fried the ship’s old systems when we showed up. The tubes … need fixing, or they'll break for good.” 

Tilly was already lowering Reno to the floor. 

“Commander, I can’t allow you to bring these cryotubes on board _Discovery_ , and definitely not the _Cornwell_ ,” Zix said. “It’s too risky – according to our database, the lost ship _BaS ‘elth_ was a weapons development vessel. The preserved life forms might have been disease incubators or test subjects. The safest course of action would be to jettison them all into deep space immediately.”

Tilly carefully peered over the nearest pod.

“Don’t worry,” Reno said dryly. “I took care of the trap.”

The glare from the lights overhead was still bouncing off the smooth surface of the tube, but now that Tilly was looking closely, she could make out the still figure of the person inside. They appeared humanoid, thin and bruised with long ragged gray hair and dressed in regulation Starfleet blues. There was no insignia, just frayed threads where the badge had been ripped off, and their peaceful expression made a stark contrast to their clothes and body. The side panel of the tube had been cast aside – Reno's bloody handprints were all over it – and Tilly could see that some basic repairs had been done to the ancient wiring.

“Captain Zix, if all these tubes are full, there must be about twenty people here,” Tilly said.

“And I assure you, we will honor their sacrifice appropriately –”

“But we don’t need to!” Tilly interrupted, taking the communicator back from the engineer.

She crouched in front of Reno.

“I’ll be right back,” she said. “Don’t die, okay? Stamets’ll kill me. So maybe really please don’t?”

Reno gave a quick nod, and Tilly ran back to the chamber with the shuttle.

“Good thinking, Ensign,” Zix said.

Tilly blinked, but knew better than to argue with praise, no matter how strange.

“I appreciate the compliment?” she said as she returned to the computer station and carefully coaxed the monitor into allowing her access to the ship’s defenses.

“Raise shields to … um ... 30%, slowly,” she commanded, and watched on the monitor as a translucent green glow surrounded the ship’s schematics.

"Ensign Tilly, the Klingon vessel just raised its shields,” Zix said, with something like fear in her voice. “Who else is on board?”

“Just me and Commander Reno, Captain,” Tilly said as she jogged back down the corridor. “Oh, and all those people in the cryotubes who’ve survived for hundreds of years and definitely don’t need to die just because we happened to show up in the wrong quadrant of this sector at the wrong time. I put the shields up.”

“This is insubordination,” Zix responded in a terse whisper. “And it’s recklessly dangerous. Ensign Tilly, you are under direct orders to leave the Klingon vessel, with or without the injured crew member. Lower your shields immediately and prepare to depart.”

“I heard that,” Reno said weakly, still leaning against the cryotube.

“Okay, I acknowledge your orders,” Tilly said with a nervous giggle. “But, see, the problem is, Commander Reno’s right. We can’t leave all these people here to die – that's not Starfleet. It’s not my Starfleet – the old Starfleet, I guess. My Starfleet didn’t abandon me when I got kidnapped by a sentient mushroom spore, and I never thought they would, even though I had no idea how they’d find me. And if abandoning people is Starfleet now - maybe I’m talking about things I shouldn’t have opinions on, I mean, what do I know? I’m just an ensign. And I’m really more of an engineer than an ethicist, I only took first-year ethics because it was a required class and if I'm being honest I sort of slept through most of it. But if _your_ Starfleet means leaving people behind to die then, just on a personal level, I don’t want it. I know you said there’s too much interference right now to beam us out, but once that dies down, I was thinking that you might try grab me and Commander Reno without the cryotubes, or throw them all out into space, and I’m not okay with that. So, until you give us permission to bring all these people in the tubes back to _Discovery_ or your ship, I’m keeping the shields up and staying right here.”

Tilly finally breathed.

“Hell of a speech,” Reno said.

“Thanks,” Tilly said as she turned off transmission on her communicator, leaving it only able to receive incoming messages. “You think it worked?”

“I’m not sure,” Reno asked. “Unconscious people, they’re like machines, I can figure them out eventually. Conscious people … much more complicated.”

“And if it didn’t, you’ll teach me how to fix the cryotubes?” Tilly asked.

She expected Reno to nod, but instead, the engineer just stared straight ahead.

“You don’t have to stay, Tilly,” she said. “Zix hasn’t called a quarantine yet; you can still go back to _Discovery_ before we’re stuck here for as long as she says so. This doesn’t have to be your fight – I'm not ordering you, understand?”

Tilly didn’t even have to think about it.

“Understood, Commander,” she said. “How do I fix these things?”

Reno sighed and began to explain the different levels of warning lights so that Tilly could triage which mechanical failures to fix first, and Tilly’s communicator gave another hiss.

“Ensign, Commander, the grace period has elapsed,” Zix said coolly. “Pursuant to Starfleet regulations, you are now under a five-day quarantine aboard the Klingon vessel.”

The channel from _Discovery_ went dead, and a sea of urgent warning lights was reflected in Tilly’s wide eyes.


	4. Chapter 4

The lights flashed, and Tilly ran. No sooner had she fixed a problem on one tube than two more started failing, and all she could do was race to finish each repair before she was needed elsewhere.

“The cortical perfusion systems on α-19 are shot,” she shouted in Reno’s general direction. “I don’t have enough supplies to do the fix.”

“Take apart the temperature control interface,” Reno replied after a moment. “We’ve got ship-wide life support up, so they don’t need it. Use those parts.”

Tilly didn’t have any time to stop and puzzle over each component of the unfamiliar mechanism, so she let her hands do the thinking for her, reaching in and disconnecting wires from the redundant system as though she did this every day.

“Tilly.”

A new voice came over the communicator, distracting her just enough to slow her down.

“Not now, I’m elbow-deep in cryotube guts,” she replied through gritted teeth.

“Then I won’t interrupt you,” the voice said with a strained chuckle. She was sure she recognized it. She knew who this was – but that couldn’t be right.

“Doctor Culber?” she asked, finishing off the last bit of the repair with a few filaments salvaged from her evac suit. “Is that you?”

“None other,” he replied.

“Aren’t you on the _Enterprise_?” she asked. “I mean – weren't you? I saw you leave.”

“I came back,” Culber said, as though there had never been any doubt that he would.

“That’s great!” Tilly grinned, then paused. Her stomach dropped as she remembered the attacks that had battered _Discovery_ as they finished the suit, and the injuries Stamets had sustained. If Hugh had chosen to abandon the present he knew for a future with Paul, only to get neither … she couldn’t even imagine it.

“How’s Commander Stamets?” she asked cautiously.

“The same, I think,” Culber replied in a very quiet voice. “They won’t let me treat him – Pollard said to let someone else take over, and I can help you. How’s Jett?”

Tilly did a quick check that all her repairs seemed to be holding, then made her way back to the engineer. She was shivering, and the open helmet of her evac suit was lighting up her face with graphs and charts. Tilly could read her declining vitals in the reflection.

“Still spiked, still bleeding,” she replied quietly to Culber. “Getting worse. Her suit saved her, but she’s in and out of it, and I think she’s running a fever.”

“Hm,” Culber said. "Did you bring a tricorder with you?”

“Not for a salvage mission,” Tilly responded. “We knew what we were looking for. Why?”

“It sounds like she’s deteriorating pretty fast – I think the weapon that got her might have been armed with some sort of toxin,” he suggested.

Reno coughed.

“Well that’s just fantastic,” she drawled.

“Actually, it is,” Culber responded. “If all these symptoms were from blood loss and shock, we’d have to get her in sickbay right now. Otherwise – I'd still prefer to have her in sickbay, obviously, but her odds are a little better in the short-term. She was standing right in front of the trap when it hit her?”

“ _She_ knows you’re calling her an idiot for making an obvious mistake,” Reno responded.

“I think so,” Tilly answered.

“The point is, that trap would have been designed to kill her – and most humanoids,” Culber continued. “But if the evac suit was enough to slow it down, then it didn’t have enough force behind it to kill a Klingon, which means they added poison to make sure that none of their own could get out unscathed, either. That’s … ingenious, and incredibly cruel. You were supposed to die instantly, Jett, but a Klingon traitor would get a slow, lingering death away from battle.”

“What can I do for her?” Tilly asked. “I already know not to move the spike until an actual doctor takes over -”

“Good, Tilly,” Culber interrupted. “You don’t want to risk making her injuries any worse. Beyond that, we’re going to convince Zix to get you both out of there – she'll have to listen to the crew. So you just need to keep Reno conscious for as long as you can and let me know if anything changes, and we’ll take it from there once we’ve got you back.”

“How?” Tilly asked. “I’ve got no med kid, no supplies –“

“Talk to her, you're good at that,” Culber said. “Just like how you used to talk to me when I was waiting around engineering for Paul’s shift to finish up – opera, historical computer languages, whatever you like, just keep her engaged.”

The communicator gave a low-pitched whine.

“I have to go,” Culber said through the interference. “Hang in there, okay?”

Then he was gone.

Tilly took another suspicious look around the cavernous room, wondering if she had missed another warning light go off while she was talking to the doctor. Seeing none, she sat down beside Reno and thought about what to say.

“Aren’t you supposed to be … keeping me engaged?” Reno asked, turning slightly towards her.

Tilly gave a harsh laugh.

“I can’t think of anything to say that you’d find interesting,” she admitted. “I could tell you about the articles on warp core design that I’ve been reading, but you sent me most of them. You don’t need to know what I ate for breakfast, or what I’m allergic to, or what I think about my freckles. You barely know – sorry, knew – Lieutenant Tyler, even I barely knew Po and it doesn’t feel real that I’m never going to see her again, or my mother…"

She trailed off, rolling the idea over her tongue as she tried to decide if she liked the taste. It wasn't as bitter as she had feared.

“So how come you're here?” Reno asked. “You could’ve stayed back. With Po and your mom. Why go to the future?”

“Michael,” Tilly simply answered. “She’s amazing. And not just amazing – I mean, you’re amazing, Commander Stamets is amazing, but she’s _amazing_. She really cares about the whole universe like no one else I’ve ever met, even in Starfleet; it’s like she’s decided that her job is to protect everything she loves, and she loves everything _so much_ \- and it’s not her job to do what she does, it’s not anyone’s job, it’s way too much, but she tries anyways, and I couldn’t ever stop her but I don’t have to let her try alone.”

She took a deep breath – she had run out of air – and the quiet sound of another alarm appeared in the silence.

“I’m on it!” Tilly said as she leapt to her feet and ran towards it, claiming it for herself even though there was no one else here who could do this work.

The cryotube was close by, and as Tilly disabled the traps and removed the outside panel to get to work on the affected mechanisms, she made sure to take a moment to look inside. The prisoner was obviously Vulcan, and their rank insignia had been neatly cut away instead of torn – maybe they had done it themselves, or hadn’t fought so hard to keep it.

“All right,” Tilly muttered as she dismantled the nonessential mechanisms and salvaged parts from her own evac suit to keep the dying stasis feedback interface gasping along for a little while longer. “I know how to do this. I can do this, right? Right.”

Unless the damage to the ship’s systems continued to worsen as the interference from the wormhole dissipated, Tilly was confident she could keep all these cryotubes running for a while longer – maybe long enough for Doctor Culber and the rest of the crew to get Zix to change her mind – but Reno’s injuries were far out of her area of expertise, and she was really wishing that there was someone else here who could take charge of the engineer’s care.

“But there isn’t,” she said out loud, with a mix of confidence and dismay. “It’s just me. I'm the only Starfleet officer on board who isn’t compromised, which makes me the most senior active officer on board...”

“What are you laughing at?” Reno asked as Tilly made her way back over.

“I just realized,” Tilly said as she sat back down with a shake of her head that made her curls bounce all over. “You’re hurt, and the ship was abandoned when we boarded, so I think that technically makes me the captain of the _BaS ‘elth_.”

Reno gave a tight smile and pointed at the wiring in the leg of her evac suit, which she was starting to strip for parts.

“If we didn't need supplies, I’d give you some of this for shoulder braid,” she said. “You'd be good for it, Tilly.”

Tilly didn’t care that it was a meaningless, unearned title – the more she thought about it, the more it felt right. The _BaS ‘elth_ was _her_ ship, Reno and all the people in the cryotubes were _her_ crew, and she was going to keep them all alive if it was the last thing she did.

“Well, maybe when I make captain in real life, you can give me my real braids at the ceremony,” Tilly said. “If you want to. If I’m even still on the command track, since all the requirements have probably changed and I’ll have to start all the way over. It’s sort of funny, how I'd always imagined it – not that I spent too much time imagining it, because I know it’s not reasonable to expect that I of all people can pull this off – but I thought I’d ask my mom to pin the braids on me, even though she isn’t Starfleet. She would have been so...”

“Proud?” Reno asked.

Tilly shook her head.

“Surprised,” she said. “I wanted to see the look on her face when she finally realized that I had made it on my own merit.”

“She … really didn’t know?” Reno slurred, eyes closed.

“Hey!” Tilly said, remembering what Culber had told her. “Hey, commander, you have to stay conscious, okay? We can talk about … um … ice cream! Or … interplanetary real-estate, how does that sound? Or you could tell me what you saw when you were charging the time crystal!”

Reno made a small noise, and Tilly realized that she had probably overstepped.

“Sorry - forget that last one, I really shouldn’t have brought that up,” she said quickly. “I don’t have to know what you saw; it was probably really intense; you don’t have to go through that with me – or anyone! We’ll talk about something else.”

“It’s okay, Tilly,” Reno interrupted. “I’ve just been … trying to figure it out.”

“Figure what out?” Tilly asked.

“You know the basic principles of how these things work, right?” the engineer asked.

Tilly shook her head.

“Me?” she said. “No. I’m not sure anyone does – maybe the Klingon monks, but even then, from what I could tell their whole deal was about taking care of the crystals in a spiritual way, and maybe also in a saving-the-universe way, since they couldn’t even let their own people use them as a weapon of war, but I don’t think they did a lot of research. I know they have a non-equilibrium matter state, but that’s about it.”

The expression on Reno’s face looked like she might have been trying for a smile.

“More basic than that,” she said. “Not what they are – what they do.”

Tilly blinked.

“Well. Travel through time,” she said. “And show you the future – that's how Michael knew the _Enterprise_ was going to get hit; she touched the crystal.”

She knew she was right, so she was surprised to see Reno wince and shake her head.

“That’s what I thought,” the engineer said. “Time crystals. Show you possible futures. That’s the whole point of them.”

“But not for you?” Tilly guessed.

“I think it was showing me a future that … could have been, in another universe,” she said.

Tilly ran her fingers through her curls.

“Another universe?” she asked. “I mean, a lot will have changed in our own universe in nine hundred and thirty-ish years. Maybe -”

“Not this,” Reno cut her off with a grimace. “When it wasn’t showing me that fucking torpedo, it showed me Marta. She seemed so real … she was real, every time. And it all could’ve happened. We were talking about things we’d never talked about but could’ve, going to these museums that she’d always wanted to visit but we’d never had the time, watching eight suns rise on a planet I don't know – we had a whole universe, our whole lives.”

“Jett, that’s -”

Tilly let her voice trail off. She didn’t know what to say. No wonder Reno had looked like hell when Tilly saw her on the bridge.

“It was torture,” Reno said with an attempt at a shrug that just made her go paler. “You know, I still don’t get why Pike came back from Boreth looking like death warmed over. I’ve read his file. It’s not like he’d already lost a future.”

The alarm on the nearest cryotube started beeping, and Tilly lunged for the open panel.

“What’s the issue?” Reno asked, wide-eyed and more alert than she had been in a while.

Tilly ran through the diagnostics and localized the fault.

“Just a filter jam,” she said, reaching in and manually unsticking the blocked hardware. “Easy.”

Reno’s face twitched with emotion. 

“I hate time crystals,” the engineer said, one hand resting on the cryotube beside her as Tilly worked. “I wish I'd had one … but they’re mean bastards. They stay with you.”

She was starting to slur her words again, and Tilly was having a hard time following what she was saying.

“What do you mean?” Tilly asked as the alarm finally went silent. “Commander, the crystal burned out when we came through the wormhole. You’re nowhere near it.”

Reno was silent, too, for long enough that Tilly was starting to get very worried.

“I’m still seeing her,” Reno said, so quietly that Tilly had to strain to hear. “Everywhere, Tilly – she's everywhere. I’d thought I was … moving on? Getting better? Guess she would’ve been happy about that. And now I’m walking off the bridge and I’m sure I see her around the corner, but when I get there, it’s someone else. _Discovery_ ’s hailing us on that communicator, and for a second I _know_ it’s her calling, I hear her voice, and then I realize no one’s even talking yet. Even in these cryotubes – that's why the spike got me, I wasn’t thinking. I thought I saw her here, too.”

Tilly blinked.

“It’s like losing her again,” Reno said, oblivious to the realizations that were exploding like fireworks inside the ensign's head.

Tilly took a deep breath. There were a thousand painfully wonderful possibilities she wanted to shout from the rooftops – but what if she was wrong? Everyone always called her too optimistic, too naïve for her own good.

 _I am the captain of the BaS ‘elth_ , she reminded herself. _Commander Reno is a member of my crew_. _I have a duty to not fuck this up_.

“What did she look like?” Tilly asked – and she knew it sounded like she was blurting out the question like she always did, but in her own mind, she was exercising a tremendous amount of self-control to keep her reaction so limited.

“Marta?” Reno asked, closing her eyes. “You know, she had this big, goofy grin. That’s not why I fell for her – when we first met, she was writing petitions and leading protests to get Starfleet to eliminate their last death penalty charges, and she cared so damn much she made me want to change the world just for her – but it kept me falling in love with her, every day, every time I saw her.”

Tilly closed her eyes. All the people in the cryotubes had a neutral expression as a side effect of the stasis program.

“I’ve got a holo recording,” Reno said suddenly. “Want to see?”

Tilly almost leapt at the chance.

“Yes!” she yelped. “I mean, yeah, sure. I’d love to.”

Reno twisted the metal ring off her finger. She fumbled to slide it off, so Tilly helped, though her own hands were shaking so badly that she probably wasn’t of much use. Reno slumped back against the cryotube and closed her eyes, as though the effort of removing the ring had been terribly draining. Her evac suit was made of a dark material, so it was hard to tell, but Tilly was almost certain the engineer was bleeding through her bandages.

Considering the ring, Tilly could see the little projector embedded in the metal, and the shiny round patch on the top of the ring that could have been a gem but instead housed the activation switch. Cautiously, nervously, she ran her thumb towards it.

An alarm went off on one of the farthest cryotubes.

“I’ll be right back,” she said, lunging to her feet. “Don’t go anywhere, okay?”

She wasn’t sure if Reno heard her, but there was no time to linger – she slipped the ring into her pocket and raced towards the noise.


	5. Chapter 5

Commander Michael Burnham of the U.S.S. _Discovery_ was good at many things. Doing research on uncharted planets. Piloting a shuttle. Standing by her principles.

But she was not very good at keeping still.

Michael pinballed around the auxiliary sickbay quarters like an asteroid in a containment field; sitting, standing, pacing from wall to wall, going over to the replicator without asking for any food or drink, lying on the bed, lying on the floor, doing stretches.

She had tuned her computer into an open channel from the bridge, so the quiet voices of her friends and colleagues filled the silence, but she almost wished she hadn’t heard what new captain had to say.

In the few moments that she was able to stop thinking about Tilly and Reno on that ship, her mind grasped at family. Her mother and father, yes, but also Spock. Sarek. Amanda. So many people who would never know what had happened to her. So many people whose lives she was now unable to affect – whose lives were now long gone.

“Computer, confirm that _Discovery_ remains blocked from receiving incoming data, and that the sphere data remains secure.”

“ _Confirmed_ ,” the computer said. “ _By order of former Acting Captain Saru and maintained by Captain Zix, the U.S.S._ Discovery _is unable to transmit or receive data from all sources except communications, which is maintained separately from the sphere data_.”

Michael felt the knot in her shoulders relax slightly, and she wished this relief came entirely from knowing that the data was safe, and not because of the reprieve the blockade was granting her. Once they reached Terralysium and _Discovery’s_ computers were able to link up with the wider Federation databases, she would have access to her family’s records. Until then, she could remember and love them as she had left them – her adoptive parents, grieving and yet so proud of her; Spock in that broken shuttle, young and courageous and brilliant and devastated that he could not follow her where she was going. They would never know – they never _knew_ , she corrected herself – what became of her after the last red burst, and she was about to lose them forever once the now-ancient stories of their lives and deaths were in her hands.

And she wanted to grieve for them, in both the Vulcan and the human ways, with all parts of herself, but her unruly heart was also refusing to reject the hope of maybe seeing her mother again so soon.

These emotions were getting out of hand despite her best efforts to shield herself against them, so Michael did not mind being interrupted by raised voices in the corridor outside her quarters. She untucked herself from her perch on the end of the bed and crept towards the door.

“This officer has just done more, and been through more, than you could understand even if you _did_ read her mind,” Doctor Pollard was saying in a whisper so emphatic it carried like a shout. “Her memories will still be there in the morning, Captain Zix.”

“I feel how much you care about her,” Zix replied, even-toned. “I think you know that I have to determine whether this ship is actually, somehow, the _Discovery_ , or whether you’re an impostor threatening Starfleet and my crew. You say Commander Burnham pulled _Discovery_ out of its own time; she's the only one who can confirm that part of the story.”

“And she will come and talk to you – if she wants to – when she’s rested,” Pollard said. “Why don’t you go back to the bridge and find a better way to tell my crew that you’re going to let a good engineer die on that Klingon ship because you’re too married to your protocols to give a damn?”

“You understand, I presume, that the risk of biological weapons contamination is no laughing matter?” Zix asked, with a note of genuine concern in her voice – maybe she thought that this crew had come from so far in the past that they might not know these things.

Pollard did not respond, but Michael could hear her silent fury.

“I will do my duty to my people, Doctor Pollard,” Zix continued. “As you must do yours.”

“Duty,” Pollard scoffed. “Katrina Cornwell knew what duty was. Captain, the namesake of your ship would never -”

“ - Doctor Pollard, you’ve seen my reports,” Zix interrupted wearily.

“And you’ve read my mind,” Pollard responded. “You know where I stand.”

Michael pressed the panel by the door and let it slide open, startling the two officers in the hall.

"Thank you for defending me, Doctor,” she said. “Captain, I am willing to be interviewed.”

Pollard’s face twitched.

“Are you sure?” she asked. “Particularly under the circumstances -”

Michael lowered her voice.

“I can’t rest,” she whispered. “If there were any way I could help Tilly bring Reno and the others home, I would be on that ship already, but she’s trapped, and I am stuck here waiting for … something. At least I can do this.”

Pollard sighed but tapped a few buttons on the panel by the door and input her code – Michael felt a sudden awareness of silence as a quiet buzzing disappeared.

“All right,” Pollard said, her whole demeanor radiating disapproval. “But this interview stops the moment Michael thinks she wants it to. Understood?”

“Understood, doctor,” Zix said as she stepped over the threshold. “I appreciate your diligence.”

Pollard stalked off down the hallway, muttering a few things under her breath that were probably reminders about the other patients she needed to check on, but might have been some very choice insults.

Michael gestured at the chair by the empty desk.

“Please have a seat, Captain,” she said, resuming her own perch on the bed.

Zix was short. Her inhumanly dark eyes were the only indication of her species, and she looked around the sparse room like someone who was used to being able to tell a lot about a person from their surroundings.

“These are temporary quarters,” Michael explained. “Doctor Pollard would prefer that I avoid dangerous missions for the time being, and I believe this is her way of keeping an eye on me.”

“After what the crew says you did, that makes sense,” Zix said. “Commander Burnham, as it appears you overheard, I am a member of a telepathic species. Would you allow me to access your memories of becoming the Red Angel so that I can confirm them?”

Michael frowned.

“If you can read my mind, why are you asking?” she asked.

Even on Vulcan, where they were all taught to be conscientious about touch telepathy, Michael had occasionally seen even members of her own family take what they needed without permission.

Zix gave an enigmatic smile.

“Because I’m not a monster, Commander Burnham, whatever you may think,” she said. “I can’t help what I’ve felt radiating from you since I walked into the room, but I won’t pry unless you let me. Besides, for an ancient ship, your sickbay has some excellent shields against telepathy."

“We do?” Michael asked. This was the first she had heard of it.

“I’m frankly amazed Doctor Pollard was able to negotiate for them, since these early prototypes cost so much power to run,” Zix nodded. “But she seems to care deeply about her crew’s privacy, so I imagine she was willing to stake a lot on it.”

Zix’s tone was friendly, almost admiring, but Michael still caught herself trying to gauge the likelihood that these compliments were backhanded.

“She cares about her patients,” Michael agreed, deliberately rephrasing the statement. “She feels responsible for every life on this ship.”

“A common trait around here,” Zix remarked. “Commander. Your memories - may I?”

“Of course,” Michael consented, but she paused as soon as she did. Where should she start? With her mother’s death? Her reappearance all these years later? The red signals? Spock? How Michael wound up on the _Discovery_ in the first place? No, Zix didn’t need to know that she had gotten her captain killed and started a war because she had failed to look beyond protecting her people. So, rescuing Reno from the _Hiawatha_ , and seeing the Red Angel there? The encounter with the dying sphere? Traveling with Saru to his homeworld? Terralysium, their destination? Building her suit in the middle of a war zone? It had all been so much, and she had barely had a chance to step back and acknowledge the whole of it.

She took a deep breath.

“Alpha Lupi was about to go supernova,” she said, beginning from what she had always thought of as the end. “I was ten years old. We-”

“It’s all right, Commander,” Zix interrupted. “You've shown me everything I need. I believe you. And – if I may?”

Michael nodded, still disoriented from knowing that Zix had just read every thought that passed through her mind as she tried to remember.

“We still study you at the academy,” she said. “Every year, the command-track officers prepare a mock trial of Starfleet mutineers to help us with our understanding of the law. I had your case, back in the day.”

Michael’s lip twitched.

 _Tilly is going to have a fascinating experience with that_ , she thought, before she remembered where Tilly was and why she was there.

“We all know you shouldn’t have been convicted,” Zix continued. “My team got you exonerated in half an hour, and top marks for securing you a commendation as well. Of course you only acted to save your ship and crew when no one else would; there’s nothing more Starfleet than defending your own.”

“I disagree,” Michael frowned. “Captain, I plead guilty for a reason – it wasn’t because I broke the law. When I chose to mutiny, I was afraid, and in my fear I acted out of love for my crew. But Starfleet does not fire first, and our survival is not as important as the principles for which we stand.”

Zix gave her a bittersweet smile.

“Well,” she said after a moment. “You are a woman of your convictions, Michael Burnham, and I'll advise this year’s cadets not to call you to the stand.”

The captain rose to leave.

“Wait,” Michael said.

“Is there something else, Commander?” Zix asked.

Michael nodded.

“I gave you my memories,” she said. “I’d like to ask some questions in return.”

Zix closed her eyes.

“Ensign Tilly and Commander Reno,” she summarized, knowing Michael’s question before she asked it. “And the cryotubes. Commander, I submitted my communications with the away team on the _BaS ‘elth_ into the ship’s records – you must have seen them.”

Michael nodded.

“I would have let them come back,” Zix continued. “Not with the artifacts, of course – that would be a bridge too far – but the officers had only been over there for a few minutes, and I think your decontamination procedures would have been thorough enough. But they chose to stay – Ensign Tilly _chose_ to stay – so I have no choice but to enforce the quarantine period."

“Five days from now, Commander Reno will likely be dead,” Michael said. “I doubt that whoever wrote these protocols intended -”

Zix was shaking her head.

“They’re called the Cataria protocols,” she said. “After the _U.S.S. Cataria_. My first command. We were assisting an archeological salvage mission in Sector 70, restoring Klingon artifacts from your war. Easy work, scut work. I complained. Well. A form of weaponized bacteriophage that had been developed on one of the relics was modified to conceal it from tricorders and medical scans, and I lost ninety-three crew members before we even identified what the hell was killing them.”

“I’m sorry,” Michael said.

Zix nodded.

“When you were thinking about your history, you remembered – I couldn't help seeing – the loss of Philippa Georgiou,” she said. “Many Starfleet officers died in that war, Commander Burnham, but you feel her so keenly because she was in your heart.”

“She was my captain,” Michael acknowledged, surprised by the change of subject. “And a friend, I hope.”

“That’s the thing about being a mind reader,” Zix said quietly. “My entire crew – everyone around me - is in my heart. I was with them when they died. They were in terrible pain, and despair I couldn’t have imagined. A few of them were so determined not to leave the ones who loved them I almost thought they would survive by force of will. I wrote the protocols you hate so much, in between the funerals, to make sure it could never happen again. Then it happened to two other ships who ignored what I had to say or thought I was too harsh. It … destroys me, that you would have to grieve for a Starfleet officer who chose to die rather than return to their ship, but I can’t risk the lives of the crew that exist here in exchange for just those two.”

Talking about the _Cataria_ disaster made Captain Zix seem less assured, like a younger officer, and Michael had to wonder what it would do to a person to grieve like she had grieved for Philippa a hundred times over, each time unique and equal in intensity.

“You sound almost Vulcan,” Michael said, missing home.

Zix gave a sad grin.

“It’s funny you should say so,” she said. “People often assume that Betazoids are illogical because we feel our emotions so strongly, but I’ve never believed that. Even when I’m fully aware of how unpopular my decisions are – and I know _exactly_ what you think of me, Commander – I never forget that protecting my crew is more important than being liked by them.”

Michael thought of the beautiful scorched planet that had adopted her just as much as Sarek and Amanda had, and wondered whether her Vulcan father would have agreed with Captain Zix’s adherence to protocols. He was rigid, yes, and stubborn to so many faults, but ultimately not unkind. No, Sarek would not find it logical to abandon people who could so easily be saved – he would say that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, but freedom from risk is not as great a need as simple survival. He would be finding some way to protect the crew -

“But there isn’t one,” Zix interrupted. “The only way to avoid risking the crew is to wait out the quarantine period.”

Michael took a deep breath and shored up the shields in her mind, putting layers of blank barriers between her surface cognition and her innermost thoughts. The defenses that she had been taught to build since childhood were almost never tested anymore, and she was surprised to discover that she had lost the instinct to reinforce them constantly. 

The door hissed open, and Doctor Pollard stepped over the threshold.

“Michael, how is it going?” the doctor asked, ignoring the captain.

“Productively,” Michael said. “I believe Captain Zix has everything she needs from me.”

“Is that so?” Pollard asked, with a gentle expression but a core of steel. “In that case, I would think she should be going back to the bridge.”

“I was on my way,” Zix said, rising. “Commander Burnham, it was a pleasure to meet you.”

Michael shook her hand as she departed.

Pollard frowned and tapped the panel, and the shields activated with a quiet buzz.

“Was it all right?” she asked again.

Michael closed her eyes and thought for a moment.

“I am uncertain,” Michael finally settled on the word. “I can envision a version of events where we rescue the away team but bring back a Klingon disease with them, and the report they write about our deaths is that Zix is a reasonable captain who could have prevented tragedy if we had listened to her warnings. On the other hand … Tilly and Reno, and all those people … they’re alive, not theoretical, and it’s unimaginable to me that she could choose not to act.”

The door slid open again.

“Sorry to interrupt,” Doctor Culber said. “Tracy, I’m having trouble breaking through the interference, but Tilly’s last report wasn’t good. Have you made any progress with the captain?”

“What do you think?” Pollard snapped.

She radiated fury so intensely that Michael was sure Zix could sense it even through the sickbay shields.

“She remains unwilling to modify her viewpoint,” Michael concurred.

Pollard’s communicator beeped and she glanced at her screen.

“Damn it, I have to go,” she said, leaving the room at a run, and brushing past Culber as he hovered on the threshold.

“Please come in,” Michael invited the remaining doctor, gesturing at the seat that Zix had just left. “How’s Paul?”

“The same,” he said, blank-faced. “And Jett’s getting worse. Tilly’s doing everything she can – she's such a genius – but they don’t even have a med kit with them over there. I hate the future.”

“I’m so sorry, Hugh,” she said. “I thought you were staying on the _Enterprise_. You came back?”

He half-smiled.

“I couldn’t leave,” he said. “After I …"

He paused, thinking his way around the words.

“At a certain point, back when I was trapped in the network, I’d accepted that I was going to die there,” he said. “The pain would stop, and I wouldn’t have to be scared, and maybe it wouldn’t be so bad because I’d be part of something Paul loves so much. And when I came back … God, I was so angry, and I didn’t even know why. I was angry when Paul tried to act like everything was normal when we both knew it wasn’t, and I was angry when anything changed, because how could he change on me now?”

Hugh ran his hands over his face as he recalled. 

“I didn’t know what to do with that,” he continued. “But when I beamed over to the _Enterprise_ and really thought about the life I was running towards – life without Paul, and knowing he loves me, and how we would brush our teeth together when our shifts ended just to share a little more time in the evening, and the way he showed me the universe on a highway made of mushrooms - I realized I was still living like I was in the network, where I had to be afraid just to survive. But I’m not there anymore, and I want to spend the rest of my life here, with him. I’m just glad I figured it out in time.”

There was a haunted look to him as he brushed past what might have happened if he had realized what he wanted just a few hours later, when _Discovery_ was gone.

“I still can’t believe he came with me, and you with him,” Michael said quietly. “I’m terrified you’re all going to regret it.”

Hugh put his hand over hers.

“We won’t,” he said. “Michael, we chose to be here. That means we're with you, every step of the way.”

But Michael was still working hard to contain her guilt behind precise emotional walls, polished and labeled and tucked neatly out of sight.

“I was ready to do this alone,” she said. “And everyone would be safe. Reno wouldn’t be dying...”

“And we’re not accepting that she is,” Hugh said, adamant. “I’ve been thinking – are the telepathy shields up?”

Michael nodded, glancing at the panel on the door.

“Pollard reset them before she left,” she said. “Why?”

“Well, it’s something Paul used to talk about, back when he was first starting to develop the spore drive,” Hugh said, clearly relieved to be able to think freely. “He was using transporter systems in one of the early prototypes, and rather than trying to lock onto three or four objects independently, he would link them into a matrix where the whole thing could beam up at the same time, and it didn’t have to be on a transporter pad. Apparently, it was a more efficient way to use the spores.”

“That’s brilliant,” Michael said. “That way, even if they only had a few seconds to beam aboard before Zix realized, they wouldn’t have to waste time securing each tube one by one and we wouldn't have to lock on … no, it wouldn’t work. The interference from the wormhole -”

“Is dissipating,” Hugh interrupted. “Within a few hours, I think our systems will be able to handle it. The problem isn’t the interference -”

“It’s the logistics,” Michael said, finishing his thought just as neatly as he had finished hers. “Zix must have her communications officer monitoring everything we send to the _BaS ‘elth_ , so even if your plan would work, there’s no way to tell them what to do.”

Hugh nodded.

“And besides, Paul’s schematics were designed for Federation technology,” he continued. “I don’t know how well we could adapt them to the materials available on the Klingon ship.”

“From what I know, they should be compatible,” Michael said, remembering her own studies and what Ash had talked to her about.

Hugh’s PADD buzzed, and Michael picked it up.

“Tilly?” she asked. “How are you?”

“Oh, hey, Michael,” Tilly said breathlessly, barely acknowledging her. “Is Doctor Culber there? I really need to speak to him, like, right now.”

“What’s wrong?” Hugh asked, taking the PADD.

There was a split-second pause – for Tilly, an eternity.

“Nothing!” Tilly said, but checked herself. “I mean, that’s not true, there’s a whole bunch of things that are really wrong with this picture, starting with Commander Reno being unconscious and spiked on a Klingon whatsit and our replicators not working and all these tubes failing just as fast as I can fix them, but this _specifically_ isn’t a wrong thing, I just need you to be the expert on something.”

Both Michael and Hugh had spent enough time with Tilly to know that when she was talking around an issue in circles large enough to fly a shuttle through, there was probably something going on.

“I’m the expert,” Hugh repeated calmly. “So it’s a medical issue?”

“No,” the ensign said firmly. “Okay. So the thing is, Commander Reno has this wedding ring, right?”

“Right,” Hugh agreed.

“And we were talking about grief and the time crystal and all that – please don’t judge me for bringing up all the heavy stuff, you said to keep her talking and I’m not always great at knowing what other people want to talk about, so that’s what I landed on – and she was saying that she kept seeing her wife everywhere,” Tilly continued.

“That makes sense,” Hugh said. “It’s a common reaction to grief and loss.”

Michael closed her eyes, recalling how many times since the binary stars she had woken up convinced that Philippa had called her to the bridge, and how she would be halfway out of bed and into her uniform before she saw _Discovery_ instead of _Shenzhou_ on the bulkheads. She still struggled when she saw the other Georgiou in the corridors. It was wonderful and terrible to wonder how much of the captain she cared for so deeply survived in her mirror double.

“And I think I knew that,” Tilly was saying. “Except that I didn’t really remember where I’d learned it, and Reno did say that her ring had a hologram of her wife and I could look at it, so I did, and …”

Hugh was holding the PADD so tightly his knuckles had gone white.

“Report, Ensign,” he said.

“I think Commander Reno’s wife is here,” Tilly whispered. “She’s in a cryotube.”


	6. Chapter 6

In the stunned silence, Michael barely noticed herself reaching out to catch the PADD as Hugh dropped it.

The doctor staggered to his feet, wide-eyed and off-balance. He almost looked like he was back in the network again.

“I have to go,” he said. “I’m going to … check on Paul.”

He was out the door in a flash, leaving Michael and Tilly alone.

“Sorry,” Tilly said. “Is he okay?”

“He will be,” Michael said. “But – Tilly, are you _sure_ this is Marta?”

There was a pause and a click before Tilly spoke again.

“Pretty sure,” she said. “I’m looking at the hologram, and back at the cryotube, and she looks like she’s been through hell since the holo was taken, but it’s her. I’d bet on it.”

Michael pursed her lips in thought.

“And you said Commander Reno is unconscious?” she confirmed.

“Yeah,” Tilly answered, hollow.

For a moment, the crackle of interference through the communicator was the only sound between them.

“Remember when we found Hugh in the network, and Paul went running after him before any of us were sure he was alive?” Michael asked. “If he had been mistaken, I think it would have destroyed him.”

“Reno’s not going to die without knowing that her wife is right beside her,” Tilly said, and the quiet panic in her voice was enough to break Michael’s heart.

“Tilly, we are still trying to get all of you back to the ship,” Michael said.

She had expected that this would bring some comfort to her roommate, but Tilly’s only response was to give a bitter laugh.

“Before Commander Reno passed out, she was asking for water,” Tilly said. “So I went to go get her some, and the replicators wouldn’t work. The fucking replicators! And yeah, I could mangle some of the mechanisms back together and reroute power to them, but I’d have to take life support offline for a minute to do that, and we’ve both been taking our suits apart to fix the tubes. Not to mention that Reno has a giant spike through hers.”

She waited for Michael to absorb the implication of her discovery.

“It’s a five-day quarantine,” Tilly said. “The human body can only go without water for -”

“No!” Michael interrupted. “We’ll find a way to get you water, Tilly, and food, and supplies. Everything you need. We’ll fly a shuttle -”

“Except we took _Discovery_ ’s last working shuttle,” Tilly said. “Zix said the _Cornwell_ doesn’t have any, and even if they did, I can’t take our shields down or she'll try to jettison the tubes.”

“You’re not fighting for these people at the price of your own survival,” Michael said, nowhere near brave enough to make it a question instead of a statement.

Tilly sighed.

“I still have some time,” she said. “If I can shore up the repairs, then some of the tubes might survive and you come over here and get them once the quarantine period is up. The needs of the many -”

“Outweigh the needs of the few or the one, I know,” Michael finished, choked. “Everyone’s a Vulcan today. And now I think I understand why the members of so many species call Vulcans ‘heartless’.”

“Michael, don’t,” Tilly begged. “It’s not that I don’t care – you’d better believe I'm scared out of my mind – but I’m responsible for these people, and I don’t deserve to live any more than they do.”

 _Except you do, Tilly_ , Michael thought and forced herself not to say. _Of course you do._

It was a totally illogical thought that she believed with all her heart.

“Is Doctor Culber back?” Tilly asked.

“Not yet.”

“That’s okay,” Tilly said. “Do you think you can tell him that I’m really grateful for how hard he tried to keep Reno alive, and that I’ve always respected him and I think he’s a really great person, and I’m completely thrilled that he and Paul didn’t wind up in different times?”

“You can tell him yourself,” Michael said, schooling the grief out of her voice. “When you’re back on _Discovery_.”

“I know he was planning to propose to Paul before he got killed,” Tilly continued, ignoring her. “And Paul showed me the rings he’d bought on shore leave that one time – I think he buried them on a planet we surveyed after the funeral, and I don’t think he’s ever going to mention it. So tell Hugh to pop the question already before Paul spends the rest of his life getting in his own head about it. And if Paul gets mad at me for telling, remind him that he can’t be because I’m dead. Okay?”

For a moment, Michael could not speak without betraying herself.

“And, Michael?” Tilly continued.

“I’m here,” Michael managed.

“I want you to know, I think you might be the best person I’ve ever met in the whole universe,” she said. “You’re my friend, and I feel so much about you I don’t even know how to say it. I always thought I'd figure it out someday. It's all good stuff, I promise - I'm still just looking for the words. And I know … I know you’ll probably be blaming yourself for this, because I followed you into the future. But I want you to remember that I made my choice, so don’t you dare disrespect me by pretending that you forced me to come with you. And that goes double since I’m picking you to give my eulogy. I want you to spend the whole time talking about how completely awesome I am – was – and not being guilty when you shouldn’t be. Also, don't get rid of my pillows. I know they’re more comfortable than standard issue, and you should have them so you can think about me giving you a hug after a bad shift even when I’m not there.”

There was a long pause between them.

“And now I have to go, or I’m going to start crying,” Tilly said, but the sniffle in her voice suggested she already was.

She ended the transmission, and Michael put down the PADD to wipe away her own tears.

She was not sure how long she waited for Hugh to come back, but by the time he did, she was composed.

“Tilly signed off,” Michael reported, shielding herself in clipped official language. “Her most urgent concerns pertain to the lack of food and water on the _BaS ‘elth_. How is Paul?”

Hugh just stared at her for a moment, before realizing that her question might warrant a response.

“The doctors from the _Cornwell_ are sharing all the information they can over the comms, and Tracy says they’re helping more than she could have done on her own, but he’s still comatose,” he said. He ran his hands through his short hair. “It’s funny – I never thought of it this way when I was in the network, but now that I’m here and he’s … gone – and of course it’s not the same - I just wonder if I had the better deal. At least I knew he was alive.”

And Michael knew that Hugh was not only talking about himself and Paul.

“Jett and Marta,” Michael said quietly, before giving in to the petulant, childish impulse to voice her righteous anger. “After nearly a thousand years, they almost made it back to one another. It’s not fair.”

Her fellow Starfleet officers could often be heard talking about justice, discipline, ideals, and mercy, but Michael had rarely heard a shipboard conversation about fairness. In fact, the last time she remembered even hearing that word was months ago. She had been returning to her quarters after a double shift to find Tilly, hands on her shoulders where her command gold would one day go, rehearsing for a scheduled check-in with a representative from the Command Training Program.

 _Why do I want to be a captain?_ She had asked herself. She giggled, then overcorrected to a scowl before righting her expression to neutral. _I want to be a captain because... Because... Damn it, why hasn’t anybody ever asked me_ why I want this _before? Maybe they’re too busy telling me all the reasons why it’s such a bad idea. How could_ you _want this, Tilly?_

Michael had pulled away from the door at that point, planning to take another lap around the corridor to avoid intruding.

 _I want to be a captain because … the universe isn’t fair,_ Tilly had said, and Michael froze in place. _No, I probably shouldn’t say that._ _All the guides about prepping for these interviews say to talk about loving the stars – and I’ll probably do that in real life, and I really should be practicing saying that right now, so I sound like I mean it. But the actual truth is, to me, they’re just stars. What makes them so special? They burn gas and shed some light and teach us a few things before they collapse on themselves, and meanwhile we’re still here, just like we’ve always been, trying to figure out how to not act like complete assholes to one another all the time. People are cruel – to other creatures, other people, to their planets and their galaxies – and maybe I'm naïve, but I just want the universe to be a little kinder. I can’t change everyone – personally, I've never been able to do much to change anybody, really – but I want to try to make things a little better. A little fairer. Captains get to try._

If Michael had had the power to do so, she would have promoted Tilly on the spot.

Hugh coughed, shaking her out of her recollection.

“Zix can do what she wants,” he was saying. “Demote me, court-martial me, I don’t care. We can't stop trying to get them back. I keep thinking, when it was me and him...”

He trailed off.

“Hugh,” Michael began slowly, the idea coalescing as she spoke. “I think your plan to modify the Klingon transporter system could work.”

Hugh was frowning, but Michael kept talking.

“And we don’t have to transmit the full schematics, just the idea, and Tilly should be able take it from there and complete the design,” Michael continued. “If I have faith in anything, it’s her.”

“Remember, the _Cornwell_ is listening to everything I tell her,” Hugh said, not to disagree so much as to work through the problem out loud. “Zix could divert power from sickbay to put our shields up if she catches on.”

This time, Michael smiled.

“ _If she catches on_ ,” she repeated, finally seeing a glimmer of hope. “Hugh, about two months before your death, Tilly came bursting into our quarters talking about an ancient computer language she said you had introduced her to. She spent all week reading up on it, she said it was better than xenolinguistics, that it “blew her mind” -”

“ASCII!,” Hugh interrupted. “I remember. We were waiting for Paul to finish an experiment on the spore drive so that she could start running the data and I could take him on a date, and we got talking about our interests in Terran history. Did you know that she’s practically an expert on ancient human board and card games?”

Michael was surprised by this new bit of information.

“She never even asked me to play chess,” she said slowly, as it finally dawned on her why her three-dimensional chess board was so often out of place in their shared closet.

“She was nervous,” Hugh shrugged. “You should ask her.”

“When we get her back, I will,” Michael resolved. “Hugh, is there any way that you could communicate our plan to Tilly in that computer language you introduced her to, without Zix picking up on it?”

Hugh frowned.

“You think she’ll remember it well enough to understand it?” he asked.

“Of course she will,” Michael said. “She’s Tilly."

Hugh, needing no more evidence than that, took the PADD back from Michael and began to type out some notes.


	7. Chapter 7

Tilly had her left hand twisting a pair of wires together and her right hand digging through the cannibalized body of her evac suit to yank out some replacement parts, so when the warning light on the tube behind her started blinking too, she swore and nudged the panel off with her foot.

“I’m never, ever playing high-stakes Twister again,” she muttered, heart pounding as she nearly lost power to the left-hand cryotube entirely. But she saved it and the other one as well, and when the lights finally dimmed, she limped back over to Reno and let herself fall, exhausted, to the floor beside the engineer. Her communicator hissed, all interference, and she could not find the will try to call _Discovery_ back.

“How’s it going, Commander?” she asked the woman beside her, not really expecting an answer.

“Shitty,” Reno rasped.

Tilly forced herself to open her leaden eyes.

“Oh, hi, you’re back with us,” she said. She was trying to capture her usual enthusiasm, but it was far out of reach, and she knew she only sounded flat.

“Can’t I take a nap?” Reno quipped, but it was obvious that her heart wasn’t in it either.

The stress of maintaining the failing tubes and keeping Reno alive punctuated with these brief moments of calm-before-the-storm was absolutely draining, and Tilly could hardly keep her eyes open. If they hadn’t raced into this mission straight out of a war zone, she might have been able to stay alert enough to panic about the lack of food and water that was going to kill them both if nothing else did first, but as it was, she couldn’t remember the last time she had closed her eyes for longer than a few minutes. Had it been days ago?

“Hey, Commander, I think it’s your turn to try and keep me conscious,” she said, forcing the words out of her lips.

“Hugh said that’s your job,” Reno responded, teasing through the pain.

Tilly was on the verge of tears.

“Look, I’m really scared I’m going to fall asleep here, and then I won’t see the alarms and everyone’ll die because I couldn’t stay awake,” she said. “I have to keep going. I don’t know if I can, but I just … I have to, you know there’s no choice, you did the same thing on the _Hiawatha_ , except you did it alone and I have all this help from you and Michael and Doctor Culber, but I still might fail and I hate that. Please don’t let me screw this up?”

She made her head turn a few degrees to look at Reno.

“Okay,” Reno said, white-lipped, her chest barely moving even when she talked. “Conversation starters. Haven’t had to do those in a while. All right, here’s a good one – so when did you know you were bisexual?”

 _That_ jolted Tilly to a slightly higher level of alertness. When did she know? That she was bi? She was?

“Um...” she started. “Uh...actually...wait, hold on, how did _you_ know? Because until just now, I didn’t!”

Reno gave an honest laugh at that, which turned into a cough and a cry of pain.

“Sorry,” Tilly said, helping to steady Reno against the tube. “Breathe, commander, you’re okay, okay?”

Finally, Reno settled back and closed her sunken eyes.

“Did you not know?” she rasped. “I’m not wrong, am I?”

Tilly shrugged.

“No one ever asked,” she said quietly. “People don’t usually ask me what I want. And I guess it’s hard to find all the right questions on your own.”

“I just figured - you know how Paul gets a little flustered, even now, when a handsome man walks by engineering?” Reno asked. “And how I’ll get awkward around anyone he doesn’t? I thought it was pretty obvious you’re awkward around _everyone_.”

In her mind, Tilly shrunk back, waiting for the not-really-joking jokes that were surely about to follow, but Reno didn’t seem to have more to say on the subject.

“What if I’m just naturally awkward?” she asked.

Reno’s lips twitched, almost like a smile.

“I’m saying you’re not?” she asked. “For you to be you, Tilly, I figured it had to be both.”

There was a large part of Tilly’s mind that still expected any mention of her social skills to be followed up with a sharp critique. But she was starting to get used to the idea that Reno knew what she was like and genuinely didn’t mind.

“Guess I taught you something useful today after all,” Reno added.

Tilly pursed her lips and didn’t say anything more as she waited for her emotions to finish sorting themselves out.

“Stay awake, Tilly”, Reno said as sharply as she could manage.

“I’m not asleep,” Tilly said, though she wished like anything she could be. “I was just thinking. Everyone says I should do that more – think before I speak, that is, not just ‘think,’ I do that all the time and I’m usually pretty good at it, at least in some ways. I was just thinking that, well, you did – teach me something, I mean - but not in a way that matters.”

“What the hell kind of answer is that?” Reno asked.

Tilly shook her head, but her curls barely bounced.

“Everyone I’ve ever liked is out of my league,” she admitted.

“S’good,” Reno slurred. “S’how it should be. You know, I got to be … the luckiest damn woman in the universe … ‘cause I married someone so far out of my league we weren’t even playing the same game. She made me … so much better, and all that’s still part of me. Who gives a shit about ‘leagues,’ Tilly? Some things are supposed to be too good to be true.”

Tilly’s communicator hissed again, but this time, Hugh’s voice was able to make it through.

“Tilly, I know you're monitoring Commander Reno’s vitals,” he said in the deadly-calm voice that he only ever used to comfort patients in the middle of a crisis. “I’ve been going over her treatment plans, and I need you to compare them to the information I have from her records.”

The change of subject was jarring, and Tilly struggled to catch up with it.

“You need this _now_?” she asked, trying and mostly failing to add it to her list of too-many-things-that-urgently-need-to-be-done.

 _I can’t drop this_ , she told herself, forcing her exhausted mind to find a way to comply with Hugh’s request. _Captains don’t get to drop things, even when it’s hard. And God, this is impossible, but so long as I’m alive and the captain of this ship, I’ll make it happen._

“Sorry, Tilly,” Hugh said, professional and inscrutable. “I know this is asking a lot, but I really need you to pay attention to what I’m saying.”

“Okay,” Tilly sighed. “I’m okay, Doctor Culber, I’m ready. Go ahead.”

Hugh started listing off numbers. 

“Pulse 84 to 82 beats per minute, oxygen saturation 65% - ”

“No, that’s wrong – you said those were her normal stats?” Tilly interrupted. “That’s too low.”

“Let me finish,” Hugh said. “Core temperature 78 degrees –”

“ – in Fahrenheit? What the hell?”

“Blood pressure 83 over 80 –

“Doctor Culber, you do know Commander Reno is human, right?”

“Respiratory rate between 78 and 69 –”

“You know, I had a physics teacher back at the academy who said that every time we didn’t specify our units, they were going to assume we meant ‘cats per donut,’ that would honestly make more sense than this,” Tilly grumbled.

“I’m sure you can figure it out,” Hugh said. “And, last one, glucose, 84.”

Tilly’s head hurt.

“Do you need me to … read back the numbers from her suit or something?” she asked.

She looked over at Reno, who had closed her eyes and was breathing shallowly.

“No, this is for you to use to help her,” Hugh said. “Tracking her vitals and responding when they change – this is how we keep her with us, Tilly. This is how we get her back.”

She was going to argue, but another alarm went off on one of the tubes, and with the single added source of pressure, she felt herself begin to shatter from the inside out.

Still, she rose and ran to the failing cryotube, knelt beside it, yanked off the panel, and replaced the brittle wiring with new components ripped from her evac suit. Her eyes glanced over the badly bruised humanoid inside as she prayed her repairs would be enough.

“Doctor Culber, what am I supposed to do with all this fucking nonsense?” she sniffled. The fact that the doctor was still talking about getting Reno safely back to _Discovery_ seemed almost like an insult to her intelligence, when he had to know at this point that neither of them were getting out of here alive.

“Not over the conns, Tilly,” Hugh said coolly – no, coldly. “The _Cornwell_ is listening, remember, so let’s try not make a bad impression on them.”

“Doesn’t matter if I try,” Tilly said. “No matter what I say, I will.”

Under the circumstances, she hated herself a little for still caring.

Hugh sighed.

“I know this is overwhelming,” he said. “I’m going to sign off now and give you some time to think about it. Maybe you should sign off too.”

Tilly silenced her communicator without saying goodbye and limped back to Reno.

“Tilly,” the engineer rasped, her bloodless face awash in the glow of her helmet.

Tilly dropped to her knees beside her, realizing just after she allowed herself to fall that she was going to have to find the energy to stand back up again.

“I don’t know what I’m doing,” Tilly sobbed. “I don’t know what to do. I’m sorry, commander. I’m so sorry, I know you want to save all these people, and so do I, but I’m the one fucking it all up when I’m supposed to be in control of everything and -”

Reno grabbed at the sleeve of her suit.

“Those … aren’t my vitals,” she said. “Don’t know … whose, but … not mine.”

 _I really need you to pay attention to what I’m saying_.

Hugh’s plea resurfaced in the cobwebs of her mind, thrashing like a fly.

_I’m sure you can figure it out._

_This is how we get her back._

_The_ Cornwell _is listening_.

“Oh my God,” Tilly gasped, tears still dripping off her chin. “Doctor Culber is such an awesome space nerd.”

Reno’s hand gave her wrist a limp squeeze.

“Not vitals?” she asked.

Tilly shook her head, ignoring the ringing in her ears from the fast movement.

“No, not vitals, _code_ ,” she said. “Doctor Culber loves ancient Terran number systems. Let me think … okay, taking away all the medical crap, the numbers he actually gave were 84, 82, 65, 78, 83, 30, 78, 69, 84.”

“Oh, great, just what I wanted,” Reno snarked, a pale imitation of her usual self. “A short string of two-digit numbers. That’ll be easy for us to solve.”

Tilly screwed her eyes closed and concentrated.

“Except _we_ ’re not trying to solve it – _I_ am,” she said. “Doctor Culber called me, just me, which means he knows I know this. Which means we talked about it. Two digits, probably stands for letters … it’s ASCII.”

“Ask you what?” Reno asked.

“No, ASCII,” Tilly said. “American Standard Code for Information Interchange. It’s, like, the coolest thing ever! I got totally obsessed with it when Doctor Culber told me about it a while ago, so I did a bunch of reading -”

“Maybe want to … try decoding?” Reno asked.

Tilly took a deep breath.

“Right,” she said, thinking back to the tables she had memorized in her all-consuming enthusiasm. “That’s a t…r…a…n…s…p…another n…e…and another t. TRANSPNET. Transpnet?”

The word landed hard in the silence.

“What the fuck does that mean?” Tilly muttered.

But Reno was nodding.

“Transport net,” she said. “Paul … told me about this. Showed me schematics. Early spore drive stuff, prototypes. Wire a bunch of … transporter components together, so you don’t have to waste time or power locking on. Haul lots of stuff at once.”

Tilly ran a hand through her hair, pulling on the tangles.

“This ship must have transporter systems,” she thought out loud. “If they’re not too degraded, we could use those parts to build a transporter network, like Commander Stamets did … and link all the tubes together? Yeah. Yeah, we could totally do that.”

She paused, trying to figure out the next step in the plan.

“Wormhole interference must be dissipating,” Reno supplied.

“And if we do this, they must be thinking they can beam us back over to _Discovery_ ,” Tilly finished with fresh hope “All of us.”

She turned her communicator back on again. This time, there was only a slight crackle before the signal cleared.

“Sorry for being rude before, Doctor Culber,” she said. “I get it now.”

“We knew you would,” Hugh said, and the relief in his voice was palpable. “Keep doing what you’re doing, Tilly, and we’ll, er, coordinate from the ship to get you all the information you need when you’re ready for it.”

 _Coordinates_ , Tilly recognized. _Discovery_ still had its shields down, and once she had the network built, Hugh would send her the exact coordinates she would need to feed into the system to get everyone safely back home.

“Understood, doctor,” Tilly said. “I’m going to go … look after Commander Reno, just like you told me to.”

“Tilly,” Michael’s voice came over the conns, and just hearing her felt like the hug she so desperately needed. “Lieutenant Tyler mentioned that the Klingon ships where he was held captive kept the sorts of medical supplies you might be looking for near the bridge. Perhaps this ship is of a similar design?”

“Thanks, Michael,” Tilly said, grateful to know where to start looking for the transporter systems.

She signed off and pulled herself up beside the engineer, who was using the wires she had pulled from her suit to build a crude blueprint on the floor. The small components were all stained red and stank of copper.

“Oh no, you’re still bleeding,” Tilly said, trying to press down on the soaked bandages without driving the spike in deeper. “Here, I’ll try –”

Reno shook her head wildly.

“No, Tilly, go,” she said, shoving Tilly away despite the pain. “Take care of the cryotubes first.”

Tilly wished there was a better option.

“Commander, are you sure?” she asked, even as got to her feet. 

Reno did not answer as her ragged breathing echoed unevenly through the chamber.

 _I am the captain of the BaS ‘elth_ , Tilly repeated to herself, though her stubborn eyes threatened to betray her with more tears. _I have to save as many of my crew as possible, no matter what. It’s unfair to risk letting Commander Reno die to save the others, it’s not right, and a better captain probably wouldn’t be in this position in the first place, but it’s the best_ I _can do._

_It’s so little._

_It’s the best I can do._

_It’s so fucking little._

Her artificial light followed her as she limped towards the bridge, bathing the back and shoulders of her torn uniform in a steady golden glow.


	8. Chapter 8

Michael and Hugh sat across from one another with the silent PADD between them. Michael was acutely aware of the faint buzzing from the sickbay shields, and how flimsy the whole system seemed now that so much was on the line.

“I am concerned about Tilly,” Michael admitted. “I have never heard her so exhausted.”

“And if Reno dies, or if any of those tubes fail, she’ll blame herself, won’t she?” Hugh asked.

Michael nodded.

“I wish she wasn’t …” she paused, circling around the words.

“Too many people on this ship have savior complexes,” Hugh said pointedly. 

“That’s Starfleet,” Michael demurred. “And I do not believe it is correct to refer to something as a complex if it works, doctor.”

“You sound exactly like your brother,” Hugh said with a smile.

Michael shook her head.

“No, he sounds like me,” she corrected, surprised to discover that her memories had more tenderness than grief to them, at least for now.

Hugh’s shoulders shook with a quiet laugh, but he quickly turned serious again.

“Getting them back on _Discovery_ is one – good – thing,” he mused out loud. “Once they’re here, where are we going to put them?”

“In sickbay?” Michael suggested.

It seemed obvious to her, but Hugh shook his head.

“If there _is_ some sort of Klingon bioweapon on that ship, we need to keep it away from our most vulnerable people,” he said. “Besides, sickbay is so full-up that I don’t know if we’d even have the space for the cryotubes.”

“Ideally, we would want them totally isolated from the rest of the ship until the quarantine expires,” Michael agreed.

“And we’ll need medical supplies – for Jett, definitely, and some of the people in the tubes might be injured as well,” Hugh added.

“It is a shame we cannot simply appropriate one of the unused shuttle bays, but they have no independent shields, and Captain Zix has already threatened to jettison the tubes,” Michael said.

Her concern gave the doctor pause.

“You really think she would?” Hugh asked. “When they’re already safely on board?”

Michael gave a grim nod.

“When we spoke, I came to a better understanding of her principles,” she explained. “Captain Zix is determined to keep every member of her crew alive, and she uses her telepathy and empathy to inform her decisions.

Hugh furrowed his brow.

“I don’t understand why empathy would make someone so cruel,” he said. 

“Empathy, Doctor Culber,” Michael explained. “Not compassion. Zix fights for the people whose minds she can read. I have no doubt she would tear the universe apart to protect her crew, maybe more so than any captain I have ever met. I can only respect her for that. However, she will _only_ fight for the people who register in her mind – if she cannot sense them, she will not treat them like living beings deserving of aid and protection. I am confident that Tilly would be safe from her, and so would Commander Reno, if she is still conscious by the time she returns to _Discovery_. But the people in the cryotubes will not register in the captain’s mind. Unfortunately, I have to predict that she will treat them as dangerous historical artifacts.”

Hugh could only nod along.

“You learned all this on Vulcan?” he asked.

“Some of it,” Michael demurred. “My parents taught me all the usual things that human parents in human cultures do. They wanted me to be kind, to try not to harm, to care about others –”

“They succeeded at that,” Hugh interrupted.

“But in a telepathic culture, the false beliefs we carry about our emotions must be examined and understood,” Michael continued. “Sarek taught me how to quantify the value of empathy, and after those lessons, Amanda taught me its limitations. She would remind me that these feelings tend to be biased towards the people who are most like us and exclude those who seem too different, and that we must remember that we do not truly know what another being thinks just because we believe that our emotions are mirroring theirs.”

“Empathy is an emotion, but compassion is a choice,” Hugh summarized. “And some choices should be dictated by more than emotion. Well, that explains a lot.”

“About Zix?” Michael asked.

“And about Amanda,” Hugh added. “I wondered, when I met her, what it must be like for a human to live among Vulcans for so many years, but now I see how she would have been well-suited to it.”

“She was,” Michael said, with an ache as she remembered that she was speaking about a long-dead woman. “I miss her - I miss them. For all their faults, Sarek and Amanda never allowed me to believe that I was alone in the universe. On Vulcan, we learn to ground ourselves in facts and axioms, and their love was always one of mine. They were true enough to set a compass by. Even on the worst day of my life, when I had lost everything … when I was a prisoner, while the ship I loved was being destroyed around me, my family was there.”

Hugh was silent, so Michael listened to her own words hanging in the air.

“The brig,” she whispered, a spark lighting in her mind. “Hugh. We can put them in the brig.”

“Who?” he asked, blinking as he tried to catch up with the conversational whiplash. “And why?”

“We can transport everyone from the _BaS ‘elth_ directly to the brig,” Michael explained. “It is large enough to accommodate all of the cryotubes, and can activate independent shields that even the captain cannot override without a trial –”

“As part of its humanitarian protocols,” Hugh continued.

“And the humanitarian protocols would also dictate that it must provide us with the materials necessary to preserve life,” Michael said. “We will have food and medical supplies, and we can stay in the brig until the quarantine period elapses.”

“At which point, no one is in danger anymore, and everything goes back to normal,” Hugh said. “Michael, this is perfect – and, since the brig is so secure, we don’t even have to do this in secret! I can call the captain, tell her we’ve found a better plan –”

Hugh was starting to rise, but Michael stopped him.

“You can’t,” she said firmly. “Tilly is stretched too thin as it is – even with medical supplies, she has neither the time nor the expertise to keep all these people alive on her own. They need a doctor.”

“And Zix won’t let even a single one of ‘her people’ take that risk,” he said with a sour twist of his lip. “She thinks I’m so important…”

“And you are,” Michael said. “She just doesn’t understand that the people she cannot sense are important too.”

Hugh shook his head but did not make a show of contesting the point.

“There’s another problem,” he said. “I can’t access the brig directly from sickbay, and once I leave here, Zix will be able to read my mind again. And one of us has to go to the transporter room – if I’m remembering right, the coordinates for the interior of the brig can only be sent from there or on the bridge.”

Michael wanted to scream. Every time they took a single step towards a solution, the universe – or Captain Zix – threw a mountain in their way. But it was entirely against her nature to stop fighting.

So instead of screaming, she stood and faced the wall.

“When a problem is too complex to solve all at once, that does not mean that the problem is unsolvable,” she muttered to the blank beige surface, the same answer she had given on her entrance exam for the Vulcan Science Academy. “It simply means that it must be broken down into its component parts.”

It had been so many years since she had faced the panel, but Michael could still see their faces as though she were standing before them, watching them look down on her.

 _When you thought they had rejected you, you would have done anything to prove them wrong_. _Now you know the truth. So prove them right._

“The root of the problem is Captain Zix,” Michael said to the panel in her mind. “Her telepathy is strong and ship-wide. I was not able to effectively shield against her at proximity, even when she made no attempt to force my shields.”

“And I know very little about mental shielding,” Hugh interjected, unaware that Michael was not talking to him. “Sorry.”

“However, she has admitted to ‘feeling her emotions strongly,’” Michael continued. “ _Discovery_ has recently left both a war zone and the past, and most remaining crew members have abandoned their homes and loved ones to face an uncertain future. Therefore, this is a more mentally volatile ship than she is used to commanding.”

 _It’s like tug-of-war_ , Michael thought _, remembering the game that she had once tried to teach her adoptive brother. She had explained the rules – we both pull on this rope until one of us falls or gets dragged over the line, okay? Because it’s fun. Fun is what people do when they want to spend time together – and grabbed her end. Counting down to zero, she held on tight and yanked with all her might, slowly dragging the young Vulcan towards the line until the rope went slack and she toppled over on her back, landing hard on the packed red dirt. “What did you do that for?” she wheezed, staring up at her brother’s wide-eyed face. “You were supposed to pull!” Spock shook his head. “At the present moment, I am not able to exert the force required to bring you over the line against your will,” he said. “However, you were exerting more than enough force to cause yourself to fall once I ceased to provide a balance. Therefore, I believe I have won the game?”_

“The solution is for me let go,” Michael said, with a brisk nod to indicate the conclusion of her proof.

“Let go of what?” Hugh asked. The imaginary panel was replaced with the doctor’s very real presence. 

“Of my shields,” she explained. “The crew is already emotional, but most of them will be masking or burying their emotions while they are still on duty, even if they do not realize it – it is an instinctive reaction for most sentient species, and difficult for someone with no training to manipulate. If, on top of that, I drop my shields entirely, I predict that I will generate a large enough emotional signal to distract the captain.”

Hugh furrowed his brow.

“Is that safe?” he asked.

“They’re only emotions,” Michael responded, brushing his question aside. “And while Zix is focused on my feelings, I doubt she will notice my location until I am already in the transporter room, and you will be able to make your way to the brig.”

“Then you’ll need to go first,” Hugh said, nodding his agreement. “I’ll follow.”

“On my mark,” Michael said, planting herself by the door as she stripped away layer after layer of her precious shields. When she had built them, she imagined them as glass walls, as bulkheads, as shelves, as diamond sheaths, as containment fields. So, in her mind, she shattered the walls and thought about how terrified Tilly had sounded as she gave instructions for her own eulogy, and the pathetic horror of losing someone as luminescent as Tilly to Zix’s mechanical, unstoppable bureaucracy. She shredded the bulkheads and feared for Reno, dying needlessly, and ached with the hope that the engineer might see her wife again, and seethed at the injustice of a captain who would dare keep them apart after all this time. She toppled the shelves, spilling out memories of her mother and father and the night she had lost them, and the guilt that she had packed away and held on to for all these years. She burned away the crystal and grieved for the adoptive family she had lost, hundreds of years and barely a few hours ago. She neutralized the containment fields and released the panic that all of these people had followed her into the future for nothing, that it had not been enough, that it would not be enough, that they would regret trusting her, that they would hate her and blame her, and she would deserve it for not having foreseen what was to come. 

“Michael,” Hugh said sharply, cutting through her mental disarray – this was not the first time he had tried to get her attention. 

She took a deep – and hopefully not a calming – breath. This had to work. If she fought in any way to maintain her control, Zix might be able to see right through the scheme, and they would fail before they had even begun. But perhaps her fear of failure could serve to fuel her efforts.

“Now,” she said, and stumbled out into the corridor.

_Mother Father Tilly Sarek Spock Amanda Tilly Reno Tilly Philippa Tilly_

_My fault my fault my fault all my fault_

_Tilly Philippa Reno Tilly Amanda Spock Sarek Mother Tilly Father_

_Can’t lose care too much to lose always lose what I care about I destroy what I care about_

Her communicator chimed.

_They might hate me they should hate me they will hate me please don’t hate me_

“Michael, are you all right?” Saru asked – hearing her friend’s voice so unexpectedly almost jarred her back into the safety of her shields, and she clung to the task at hand.

_Saru is like a brother to me and he thought that he was dying, he asked me to kill him, I nearly killed him, I was ready to kill him, what if I’d killed him?_

“Fine,” she lied, shaky with relief as she remembered, over and over, that her friend was still alive despite her efforts to the contrary. This friend, at least.

_He is my family by choice, and I am his, and he abandoned his sister in the past because he trusted me to take us into the future, was he right to trust me? Was anybody right to trust me? Philippa trusted me until I betrayed her. I was trying to save her. I wasn’t enough._

“Are you quite certain?” the Kelpien asked quietly. “I just saw the captain go very pale and order me in my capacity as first officer to ensure that you are scheduled for the soonest possible appointment with a counselor. I know she is a mind reader, so I -”

Michael laughed, an alien sound in this alien future.

“I’m fine, Saru,” she repeated, opening her mind even further to let in all the joy and pain and hope and sorrow that she normally kept so neatly tucked away. “You know I’m just grieving.”

“Oh,” the Kelpien said. “Well, I suppose I should have expected as much – I think the entire crew is mourning in their own ways. You are not alone in this, Michael.”

Michael clutched the communicator so hard she feared she might break it.

“Thank you, my friend,” she said, then cut the connection.

And as she stumbled towards the turbolift, she stripped away another layer of shields, determined to pare herself down to the core. 


	9. Chapter 9

All in all, it took Tilly only four trips and under thirty minutes to haul all the transporter parts back to the room with the cryotubes – for a full away team, even a very good one, the job would normally have taken at least twice as long.

She wished like hell that this were just another assignment, a simulation set up to test her physical fitness and engineering skills under challenging conditions. Any moment now, if she were still at the Academy, the _BaS ‘elth_ would dissolve into a blank screen and the instructor would come in to grade her performance. She would get top marks.

But in real life, even this might not be good enough. 

Tilly sorted through her fragile materials with frantic speed and winced as the rough surfaces of the transporter pads scraped her hands raw.

“Commander?” she said, barely daring to look away from the bloody diagram the engineer had made for her to follow as she worked. “You’re going to hang in there till we get back to the ship, right? Because we’re almost there…”

Her voice failed her, panic choking anything she wanted to say. She couldn’t hear Reno’s breathing anymore. Was it because of the ringing in her ears, and how hard her heart was pounding? Or was it because she was so painfully twitchy, expecting a new warning light with every blink? She couldn’t stop to check on Reno – what good could that possibly do now? – and just prayed that the tubes wouldn’t fail as she reconfigured the ancient circuits and jammed the transporter pads into place all around the room.

She twisted a pair of wires together and watched the display register the active connection.

 _Just one more step_ , she told herself, thinking ahead to what she had to do next. _Then another._

As she reconfigured the circuits and watched each patch of display signals flicker on, she felt like she was trapped in the event horizon of a black hole – she could only do so much so fast, but time around her was rushing by.

“I’m bringing you home,” Tilly promised, sparing a split-second glance at the engineer and the cryotube that she was lying so still beside. “And you’re not dying before we get there, so please don’t make a liar out of me, commander, because I have to believe the universe won’t let that happen. And yeah, it’s not scientific, and I’ve got no evidence, and I do know that space is cold and unfeeling and impossibly big and doesn’t give a shit about you or me or anyone else, but there’s also a part of me that honestly believes in miracles, because this is the universe where Starfleet happened. I’ve been to a universe where everyone knows that nothing out there cares about them, so they choose not to care either. But in our universe, _this_ universe, we looked up at that same empty sky and said ‘fuck it, we’ll just have to care enough to make up for it.’ And if that can happen here, then I know that maybe I can save you both.”

The display finally finished configuring, and Tilly grabbed the loose transporter wiring and hauled it around the room, locking each cryotube into the system before moving onto the next, performing the most urgent emergency repairs as she went.

Her communicator whistled a wordless warbling chime – the coordinates, Tilly realized, encoded in sound waves for transmission. She rerouted that signal to the transporter terminal and watched it light up with a clear string of numbers, their map to safety. 

Then she carefully affixed a free connector to Reno’s suit and ran down the hall to the testing chamber.

Detmer’s modified shuttle was still sitting where they had parked it, and Tilly stumbled her way over to the still-active terminal that she had used to restore life support. 

“Please let this work,” she whispered, her voice so raw it hurt to pray.

Then, with a deep breath, she keyed in the command to drop the shields.

As soon as the monitor began to respond, Tilly sprinted back to the chamber with the cryotubes, leapt over the trailing cables and wires, and landed hard on her knees in the center of the net. She fumbled for the last free connector, jammed it into the boot of her evac suit, then instinctively grabbed Reno’s hand as if that alone could stop her mentor from slipping away. 

“Ready!” she screamed into her communicator, with so much adrenaline coursing through her body that time seemed to stop between one heartbeat and the next. “Ready, ready, read-”


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know this chapter is super short, so I'm posting two chapters today (10 and 11)!

On _Discovery_ ’s bridge, a new reading appeared on Owosekun’s screen.

“Captain Zix,” she reported, speaking quickly as the meaning of this data sunk in. “The Klingon ship is lowering their shields.”

A moment later, Lieutenant Bryce’s station crackled to life.

“Ready!” a ragged voice shrieked from the speakers. “Ready, ready –”

“Shields up,” Zix ordered.

And Owosekun hesitated.

Just for a second. Not long enough for anyone to notice. Not entirely on purpose.

But through all her training, and all her years as one of the finest operations officers in the fleet, Owosekun had honed her instincts to an art. Her hands rebelled against the possibility of scrambling a crew member’s signal. And so, she hesitated.

“Captain, we have been boarded on deck three,” Nilsson reported, barely a moment before Owosekun could say “raising shields.”

Zix took in this sequence of events at lightning speed.

“I have to go,” she said, leaping to her feet and racing for the turbolift. “Saru, take the chair and commence evacuation of the lower decks.”

“But where are you going?” the Kelpien asked.

“I’ve seen what a Klingon bioweapon can do to a good ship’s crew, and that won’t happen here,” she said. “I’m going down there myself to make sure we get everybody out – no one dies because they stayed to help. Not one more death on my watch.”

The lift appeared and she launched herself inside, the picture of a woman on a mission.


	11. Chapter 11

It was a long walk from the transporter room down to deck three, but Michael was barely aware of time passing her by as she marched down the empty corridors.

In a moment, she stood at the barrier in front of the brig, staring down the sensor as it scanned her.

“Entry denied,” the sensor flashed. “Science Officer Burnham is not authorized to enter the brig.”

Michael looked into the brig and caught a glimpse of Tilly crouching over a cryotube. Profoundly relieved that her friend had made it safely back to _Discovery_ , she shook her head.

“I am not here in my capacity as science officer,” she said. “I am here to remand myself into custody.”

The sensor flashed a slightly different pattern.

“For what crime?” it asked.

It only took Michael a moment to think back to the implications of her conversation with Captain Zix. 

“Mutiny,” she laughed as the barrier lowered to let her through.

Michael walked into the cell and blinked. The last time she had been in a ship’s brig, it had been empty and filled with awful silence. This was nothing like that. This was chaos.

Rows upon rows of cryotubes were scattered throughout the space like crashed landing pods, all of them flashing lights and blaring alarms in different urgent pitches. Tilly ran between them in a blur of red hair and Starfleet blue, covered in blood and pale as a sheet. Over in the back corner, Hugh was bent over a biobed, focused on saving Reno’s life.

“Michael!” Tilly rasped, barely looking up. “I think the tubes were too fragile to transport – they’re all failing, fast.”

Michael turned to face the sensor that she knew was watching them.

“The people in these cryotubes require immediate assistance to ensure their survival,” she argued. “Humanitarian protocols dictate that you must provide us the tools we need to save their lives.”

The computer debated the issue for a few long seconds.

“Negative,” it replied neutrally. “No life signs detected in cryotubes.”

“Yeah, because they’re in fucking _stasis_ ,” Tilly screamed, tears running down her grease-stained cheeks. “That’s the whole point of them being in a cryotube in the first place, you soulless piece of space garbage.”

It took Michael longer than it should have to process this information – her mental shields were still in tatters, and she was shaken after having experienced so many of her strongest emotions at once.

“We have to wake them up,” she realized. “Tilly, we have to –”

“What, you mean right now?” Tilly asked, rushing through a series of barely-serviceable repairs on one tube that were all she could manage before she was needed elsewhere. “We can’t. I can’t. It’s too much – they’re too …”

“We have no choice,” Michael said, crouching by the nearest cryotube and carefully activating the ancient interface. “If the brig cannot sense their humanity while they are in stasis, it will not allow us to help them, and they will die. Once they are conscious, they will have a chance.”

She spared a glance towards Hugh, hoping that the man who had come back from the dead might offer her some guidance on bringing people back to life, but he was too focused on his work to even notice any sort of interruption. 

“A fighting chance,” Tilly agreed, managing to look away from her immediate urgent repairs for just a moment so that she could understand what she had to do next. “Okay. I can roll with that.”

They simultaneously input the commands to deactivate the cryotubes. Two lids slid open with a hydraulic hiss, and injured bodies inside of them blinked in the harsh light.

“Wh-?” one of the prisoners began to ask.

“Don’t go anywhere!” Tilly said, already reaching for the next tube. “Just wait, please wait, okay? And we’ll explain everything.”

“Where are we?”

“You’re Starfleet?”

“You have to get out of here – the Klingons are coming back!”

“Are … are you the rescue party?”

“Is the war over?”

“My ship – my ship, the Gagarin, did they make it out of the nebula?”

“You’re Starfleet.”

“Please –”

“Help – ”

Survivors grasped at Michael’s wrists, and she gently pried their fingers off. Some of them screamed, flinching away from the pain they thought was coming, and she could only try not to hurt them any worse.

“I need a tricorder,” Tilly snapped as she deactivated the last tube. “Humanitarian protocols, right? I need to scan these people so I can figure out how to help them.”

“Request granted,” the computer said, materializing a basic tricorder on the floor by her feet.

Michael made her way over to Tilly’s side as the cryotube slid open and the woman inside opened her eyes, gasping as she took in the unfamiliar scene.

“Hi,” Tilly said, grabbing the tricorder and aggressively scanning it up and down the woman’s injured body. “Sorry about this, I’m sure this is really a lot coming at you all at once, and you’re going to have a ton of questions and there’s so much to explain, and I really want to, but first I just have to make sure –”

The woman in the cryotube barely reacted to an entire Tilly’s worth of fear and enthusiasm being directed at her all at once.

The tricorder blipped.

“Oh my God, it’s really you,” Tilly said, wide-eyed. “I mean, I was pretty sure, but – just, thank God, it really would have killed me to be wrong.”

“Marta?” Michael asked, reading the tricorder over her shoulder.

“Yeah,” Tilly grinned back, staring up at Michael for a second before wrapping her in a frantic hug.

The moment was interrupted by a gentle tap on Michael’s arm.

“Sorry,” a soft-spoken Andorian said, leaning heavily on an empty cryotube to support their weight. “I just – we were on a Klingon ship. We were prisoners. And then … suddenly we’re here … I think we all need to know, are we safe? Are you bringing us home?”

Tilly froze. 

“How are we supposed to tell them?” she whispered to Michael.

The officers’ horrified silence was broken by a pounding on the hard barrier between the brig and the rest of the ship.

“What have you done?” Zix demanded, looking frantically at the scene in front of her.

“I should probably explain it to her,” Tilly said, glancing at the captain. “Michael, can you -?”

“I will try,” Michael replied, understanding Tilly’s unspoken question and accepting the burden of responsibility.

“Thank you,” Tilly said, clasping their hands together for a moment before making her way over to the barrier. Michael felt the other woman’s touch lingering on her skin like a tingle of electricity well after they had let go. It was a small comfort against the awful sensation of all the prisoners watching her, waiting for reassurances she couldn’t give.

“I am Commander Michael Burnham of the _U.S.S. Discovery_ ,” Michael began. “My crewmates rescued you from the Klingon ship _BaS ‘elth_ , and you are all perfectly safe. However … the unusual circumstances of your rescue dictate that you will not be able to return home.”

A sea of confused eyes blinked up at her.

“What circumstances?” the Vulcan prisoner asked sharply as their fingers traced a dark green bruise spreading across their face.

“Until when?” someone else asked. “Can we at least send a transmission to our ships, and our families?”

Michael shook her head once.

“When you were discovered aboard the _BaS ‘elth_ , your bodies had been preserved in cryotubes, in stasis, for some time,” she explained.

Marta blanched.

“How long –” she started.

“Does that mean the is war over?” another prisoner interrupted, louder.

Michael nodded.

“Yes,” she said, grateful to have at least one good thing to report. “We reached an armistice.”

“An armistice?” a human asked, almost laughing in shock and disbelief. “With the Klingons?”

“With the Klingons,” Michael confirmed. “We are in peacetime.”

There were cheers at that, and smiles, and some of the prisoners embraced, but Marta barely seemed to hear the news. She just stood there, frozen on the edge of panic.

“You said we’ve been in stasis ‘for some time,’” Marta repeated quietly. “How long?”

Michael flinched. She wished Marta had not asked this, not yet. She wished she could have given these people a few more moments of relief and celebration before she had to break their hearts.

“Nine hundred and thirty years,” Michael said. Her words sounded like gunshots in the crowd. As the looks of shock, disbelief, and terror began to dawn on the prisoners' faces, Marta fell to her knees and began to cry.

“It’s all gone,” she gasped, sobbing. “Everything – she’ll have died – nine hundred years – Jett – ”

Michael knelt down beside her.

“No, it’s not like that, your circumstances are … different,” she said quietly, trying to find the right way to explain things to Marta without giving the other rescued prisoners false hope. “Jett is here.”

Marta did not respond, seemingly unable to acknowledge anything outside of her grief. She was breathing too fast, and her voice came out ragged and broken.

“We had so much more,” she cried, like she would have screamed if she only remembered how. “We – should have had – so much –”

The hiss of a hypospray startled Michael, and she almost failed to catch Marta as she slumped to the side. Hugh knelt behind her, tucking the needle away.

“She’s in shock, and she’s been through a trauma,” he explained. “We’ll let her get some rest for now, and when she wakes up, hopefully she’ll be calm enough to hear what we have to say.”

Michael nodded.

“And Jett?” she asked.

“Out of surgery,” Hugh said with a small smile. “That spike did a number on her, but she’s stable now. She’ll be okay.”

Michael froze for a moment, allowing herself to be bowled over by the weight of the news. 

“That’s good,” she muttered, head spinning with relief.

“Yeah,” Hugh agreed in much the same tone.

Together, they lifted Marta’s limp body and brought her over to a bio bed.

As Hugh connected the monitors, Michael glanced back over her shoulder.

“Can you speak with them?" Michael asked, jerking her head slightly back toward the rescued prisoners. "I think you can help better than I can."

“You think they’ll listen to me?” he asked.

She nodded.

“You’ve been dead before, and you survived it,” she said. “These people need to do the same.”

“Okay,” Hugh said, squaring his shoulders. “I’ll try.”

She gave him a grateful nod, then picked her way through the carnage of cryotubes until she was standing right behind Tilly, who was still facing Captain Zix.

“I don’t know what I can say that would make you understand,” the ensign was saying quietly, bracing herself against the containment field as she spoke. “I couldn’t leave them. I was the senior officer, so I had a duty. I had to try.”

Zix looked confused, but Michael understood. After Reno was incapacitated, Tilly must have claimed the abandoned ship as her captaincy and its prisoners as her crew. She was not the kind of person – or the kind of captain - who could ever learn to give in or stop caring. 

“You disobeyed orders and put this ship at risk for just a handful of cryotubes, Ensign,” Zix said, disbelieving. “I don’t understand how you could care so little about your people.”

That accusation seemed to push Tilly to the verge of tears, and she stumbled against the containment field.

“That’s enough,” Michael said, stepping forward and sliding her hand under Tilly’s elbow to brace her. “Captain Zix, you were so eager to defend me in your Academy classes, so you know that _I of all people_ understand what it means to disobey orders. If you believe we acted wrongly – and I truly believe you do – then you should put us on trial, but I will never be ashamed of our actions today. Commander Reno was principled, Doctor Culber was ingenious, Tilly was courageous beyond belief –”

“Michael was amazing” Tilly interrupted in a whisper.

“We were Starfleet,” Michael said. “I would be proud to stand in front of any panel of judges or admirals and tell them so.”

Zix glowered at her, but Michael stared her down until the captain turned and stalked away, presumably to draw up the charges against them.

“Are you okay?” Michael asked.

Tilly was still facing towards where Zix had been standing, staring straight ahead, dead-eyed.

“Hugh says Jett is going to be fine,” Michael said.

It took a few seconds for Tilly to hear and process that information.

“Oh,” she muttered. “That’s good.”

Michael braced herself herself as Tilly slumped against her, as though all the energy had been let out of her at once. Carefully, she lowered them both to the floor.

“You did it, Tilly,” Michael whispered, wrapping her arms tightly around her friend. “You saved your crew.”

There was a wan smile on Tilly’s face as she pressed her head into Michael’s shoulder and finally allowed herself to rest.


	12. Chapter 12

After fielding the initial onslaught of desperate questions and pleas to be returned to their own time and place, Hugh left the rescued prisoners to come to terms with this information on their own and did a round of his patients. The best thing he could do for them now was give them space to process on their own terms.

Reno was still recovering well, though there was a long way to go before she would be fully healed. He smiled, knowing she was going to fight every physiotherapy session tooth and nail, and grateful his friend was still here to give him trouble.

Marta was resting, too, the sedative keeping her dreamless and unconscious.

Tilly was sleeping curled up against Michael, and he wrapped them both in a blanket supplied by the humanitarian protocols and quietly ran a dermal regenerator over the ensign’s bleeding hands as Michael whispered her thanks.

Outside the brig, the antechamber door whooshed open and Hugh braced himself for Zix to return, but a familiar figure made his way around the corner instead.

“Paul?” Hugh asked, reaching out and hitting his hand hard against the containment field.

The injured scientist, limping and supported by Lieutenant Nilsson but very much alive, leaned on the other side of the barrier.

“What are you doing here?” Hugh asked. “I didn’t even know you were conscious. Are you all right? What did Doctor Pollard say?”

He was so relieved to see his partner conscious again that his mind was racing with questions, and they all meant _I love you_.

“They told me you were here,” Paul said, reaching up to meet Hugh’s hand where it rested on the barrier.

“He annoyed the entire medical staff until they told him why you weren’t in sickbay, he means,” Nilsson translated.

Hugh frowned, a few crow’s feet crinkling at the corner of his eyes.

“Did you leave against medical advice?” he asked.

Paul shrugged, then winced at the movement.

“Everyone was busy,” he said evasively. “They didn’t tell me I _couldn’t_ leave.”

“Paul!” Hugh exclaimed, then sighed and shook his head.

“I promise I’ll go back, dear doctor,” Paul said. “I just needed to see your face.”

Hugh would never admit it outright, but if their positions had been reversed and he had woken up in sickbay alone, he would probably have done the same thing.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t be there when you woke up,” he said instead.

Paul narrowed his eyes.

“Why are you in the brig?” he asked, looking around the space. “Who are all these people, Hugh? Hey – on the biobed back there, is that Reno?”

Hugh nodded.

“When we got to the future, we found an old Klingon ship, and Reno and Tilly went to raid it for parts,” he said, gesturing down at where Michael and Tilly were still curled up on the floor. “Reno got hurt there, and there was a whole bunch of bureaucratic crap I’ll explain later that means we need to stay in the brig for now, but what really matters is that they found a whole bunch of cryotubes with people in them from the war. So we have Marta Gowen on board –”

Paul shook his head.

“Wait, Reno’s wife?” he asked. “No, she died –”

“No she didn’t,” Hugh said, gesturing at the second biobed.

Paul stared at the sleeping woman for a moment, then burst into laughter, even though it clearly hurt his ribs to move.

“Jesus Christ,” he wheezed, leaning hard against Nilsson. “She’s back from the dead too? We’re going to have to start a support group.”

It was so obvious from the hunger his eyes and the way his hand slipped and grasped at the barrier that he wanted nothing more than to hold Hugh in his arms, just for a moment, just to make sure he really was alive again.

“I want you to know I meant it, Paul,” Hugh began. “Everything I said before, when you were in sickbay –”

“I know,” Paul said, smiling. “Or I wouldn’t have come looking for you.”

The moment was interrupted by an alarm beeping from Reno’s biobed.

“I have to go,” Hugh said quickly, leaving just his fingertips to linger on the containment field for what would have to pass as a kiss. “I love you – now go back to sickbay, and I’ll be there as soon as I can. Nilsson, if he gives you any trouble, tell Tracy I said to knock him out with a hypo.”

“But I hate those,” Paul protested weakly.

“So don’t be trouble,” Hugh shot back, reluctantly turning away.

He almost tripped over Tilly, who had woken up at the alarm and was lunging to her feet, wild-eyed as Michael tried to hold her back.

“Let me go,” Tilly said, wild eyed. “The tubes – I have to – let go of me – they’ll die – I have to –”

“Tilly,” Michael said, still holding on. “Tilly, it’s okay, the cryotubes are safe. Everyone is safe. You’re back on _Discovery_.”

When Tilly stopped fighting, Michael let go.

“I thought I was still on the _BaS ‘elth_ ,” Tilly admitted. “I thought I’d fallen asleep, and…”

“You did not fall asleep until you came back home, and everyone was safe,” Michael said. “The alarm is only from Reno’s bed – I think she’s waking up.”

Tilly made her way over to the bed with Michael close behind her as Hugh checked the readings from the display. Jett twitched and stirred slightly, opening her eyes. 

“Hey, you’re back with us,” Hugh said, a little too enthusiastic.

Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Tilly practically vibrating out of her skin with excitement.

“Okay –” Reno rasped, then coughed and tried again. “Okay, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong,” Hugh said, and even he couldn’t keep the smile off his face now. “You’re back on Discovery, and you and Tilly brought all the cryotubes back too.”

Reno glanced from him to Tilly, and back again.

“So why are you all looking at me like that?” she asked.

Hugh nodded at Tilly, who excitedly opened her mouth – then closed it again.

“I can’t get this one wrong,” Tilly whispered, looking back at the doctor.

Hugh nodded his understanding, then crouched down to Reno’s eye level. The engineer was trying to sit up, looking more confused by the moment.

“Jett, Marta was in a cryotube on that ship,” he said gently. “You saved her.”

No one had known exactly how Jett was going to react, but she surprised them all by laying back down on her pillow and staring blankly up at the ceiling.

“Blood loss or poison?” she asked.

“What?” Tilly asked.

Reno did not turn to look at her.

“You said she’s here, which means I’m dead,” she said flatly. “So, what killed me? Blood loss or poison?”

“Commander, you’re … not dead,” Tilly said. “You’re really, actually, definitely not dead, I promise. Starfleet must’ve said that Marta died when she went missing in action, but really the Klingons had her prisoner, and now we’ve found her and brought her back. You weren’t just imagining things when you thought you saw her in the tube; you were right, and now she’s back and you’re both going to be okay.”

Reno barely seemed to hear her.

“Hold on a second,” she said, turning to look at Hugh and Tilly. “If I’m dead, and you’re here too, that had better mean you’re just figments of my dying brain. I swear, if either of you died trying to save me, I’m going to kill you so hard you wake up alive again.”

She struggled to sit up, as though she was about to start making good on her threat, when she saw Michael standing at the foot of the bed.

“God _damn_ it, Burnham, not you too?” she growled – then, after a second, remembered the self-sacrificing nature of the person she was talking to. “Oh, of course, you, too.”

“Jett,” Hugh began.

“Please stop,” Jett said. “I don’t want to hear it.”

“Why not?” Tilly yelped.

“Because if we were lying to her, she’d lose Marta all over again,” Hugh answered, looking at Tilly but speaking to Jett. “It would be a horrifically cruel sort of lie.”

“Commander, we’re not lying to you,” Tilly said. “I mean – look at me, I’ve got to be the worst liar in Starfleet, everyone knows I say everything that comes into my head. And you and Marta are both absolutely alive.”

Reno gave Tilly a blank look.

“This is all going to go away, isn’t it?” she asked sadly, grief etching deep valleys into her skin.

“It isn’t –” Tilly started, but Hugh cut her off.

“It might,” he said. “But here’s a thing I learned when I was trapped in the mycelial network, seeing Paul just for a moment every time he traveled through – just because something good might go away doesn’t mean you shouldn’t hold on to what you have for now. Marta really is here, Jett, and you have the chance to be with her again, at least for now.”

“And if I lose her?” Jett asked.

“Then you’ll have had her,” Hugh replied.

Jett lay still on the bed for a few minutes as the monitors beeped above her. A few of the prisoners had drifted over to listen to what was going on, but they did not interfere, and even Tilly managed to stay silent as Jett weighed the risks against all the times she had wished and yearned and ached for one more moment with her wife.

“Can I see her?” the engineer asked.

“Yesss!” Tilly shouted, punching the air.

Hugh was a little less exuberant, but he still had an enormous grin on his face, and even Michael was smiling.

“Of course you can,” Hugh said, unlocking Reno’s biobed from its dock and floating it over to where Marta was lying. “She’s resting right now – she was in shock, so she’s going to need a bit of time – but I can put you right next to her, so you’ll be there when she wakes up.”

Hugh locked Jett’s bed in place next to Marta’s, and the engineer slowly leaned over and traced her hands gently over her wife’s face, not quite daring to touch her, as though she was afraid her hand would fall right through.

Seized with inspiration, Tilly looked up at the sensor in the ceiling.

“Computer, please scan and identify all the people in the aft starboard quadrant of the brig,” she said.

“Scanning,” it replied. “The life forms present in the aft starboard quadrant are Michael Burnham, Sylvia Tilly, Hugh Culber, Jett Reno, and Marta Gowen.”

Finally, Reno took her wife’s hand, holding her tight and looking over at the sleeping woman as though she were sunlight itself; so bright she was almost dangerous to behold. 


	13. Chapter 13

While Jett waited for her wife to wake up, Michael guided Tilly back over to the wall, where they stumbled and slid to the floor tangled in each other’s arms and legs as though they had always been meant to fall together like this.

They were both exhausted, but Tilly’s thoughts were still racing ahead of her, trying to put words to everything that had happened in her day.

“What’s on your mind?” she dimly heard Michael asking her, so she tried to string a few words into a coherent response.

“Mmm,” she said, eyes closed. “I’m thinking that I really want to live with you.”

She felt something change in the way Michael’s body was positioned around her, and suddenly heard the actual words she had said.

“Wait, hang on, hold your horses, that was supposed to be two sentences,” she corrected herself. “I was trying to say I really like being alive. And also that I really like you. I mean, if that’s okay.”

“If that’s okay,” Michael repeated, confused.

Tilly twisted around so she could see her roommate’s face a little better.

“Yeah, I mean, I know this is a crazy time for you – for all of us – and you just had to leave Ash in the past, and even if you hadn’t, I don’t know if you’d want …” she trailed off. “Sorry. It’s just that Reno was telling me I should shoot for what I want even though you’re out of my league, and since that’s clearly worked out for her, I thought I should try. But you’re my friend first, Michael. Always.”

She felt Michael nodding along with the end of what she had to say.

“I’m not sure I understand, Tilly,” the science officer said. “You want … what, a relationship? With me.”

Tilly nodded.

“Why?” Michael asked.

“Don’t worry about it,” Tilly said, making a halfhearted effort to untangle herself and push the conversation away from here. “It was just a thought. I have lots more where those came from. I mean, just the other day I was thinking about how to put the replicators in the mess hall on a timer so –”

“No, I mean, why would you want a relationship with _me_?” Michael asked, interrupting her. “Tilly, you know I’m not friendly. I’m not good with people like you are - by human standards I barely hold up my half of a conversation even when I have something to say. I have a habit of keeping to myself. Everyone you care for is uniquely fortunate to have you, but in a relationship, wouldn’t I bore you?”

Tilly felt herself physically freeze for a moment at the incongruity of what Michael had said, as though her whole body was glitching.

“You?” she laughed. “ _Bore_ me? Michael, you’re the most exciting person I know – actually, probably a little too exciting sometimes, and if you could stop getting yourself into all the dangerous situations, that would be awesome.”

“You’re one to talk,” Michael murmured.

“Also, I don’t know where you learned that there’s a single human standard for friendliness, but that’s bullshit,” Tilly continued. “You’re friendly by my standards. And totally awesome. And completely badass. And –”

Michael interrupted her with a gentle hand on back of her neck.

“In that case, think I would like to kiss you,” Michael whispered, and in that moment Tilly decided that she had never found anything sexier than Michael’s look of earnest questioning. “May I?”

“Oh, fuck yes,” Tilly grinned, tilting her head up to meet Michael’s lips.

If Tilly had been thinking about ranking Michael’s kiss against all the kisses she had ever had, this one would have made the top of the list the second she felt Michael’s fingertips brushing against her own – a quietly affectionate Vulcan kiss, to go with the intensity of their human one. But Tilly wasn’t thinking about anything but Michael, and being here with Michael, and wrapping an arm around her waist to pull her even closer.

When they eventually broke apart for air, bumping noses and remembering to breathe, both women were grinning.

“We should … _definitely_ … do that again,” Tilly said, though as she spoke, she seemed just as contented to rest her head on Michael’s shoulder for the moment.

“Agreed,” Michael said, and Tilly couldn’t help but hear a slightly wicked tone in her voice. “That is, after I defeat you at a game of chess.”

“Hang on, you think you can beat me at chess?” Tilly yelped, genuinely indignant. “Old human games are my _thing_ , Michael. I kick ass at chess!”

“I learned from Vulcans,” Michael retorted, nestling in closer. “It is, after all, a game of logic.”

“Well, then, you’re on,” Tilly said. “And afterwards…?”

Michael tried to make her face look neutral.

“Seeing as one definition of a game is ‘an activity one engages in when they wish to have fun and enjoy spending time with other people’, it seems to me the most logical game of all is one where both parties win,” she said, then laughed with surprise as Tilly kissed her chin.

“I think I scored the first point,” Tilly whispered, teasing.

“I’m fairly certain that point was mine,” Michael teased back, caressing the edge of Tilly’s ear and sending shivers down her entire body.

“Oh, I’m so definitely going to be keeping score,” Tilly said, even as she closed her eyes and began to let herself drift into the sleep she still desperately needed.

“Good,” Michael said, stifling a yawn of her own. “As you know, I am very competitive.”

From her biobed halfway across the room, Reno risked a glance away from her wife to give the two tangled-up young women a smile.

 _Finally_ , she thought.

And then, a second later: _I can’t wait to tell Marta about this._


	14. Chapter 14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here we go, last chapter! Thanks for sticking around.

When Marta began to twitch and mutter in her sleep, Jett realized the drugs must be wearing off.

Without thinking about it, she leaned over and began to stroke her wife’s hair, like she used to do every time Marta had a nightmare during the war.

“In a minute you’re going to be awake, and I’ll be right here,” she said quietly, filling the space with words even though she didn’t think Marta could hear her yet. “Oh, I think you’re going to want a haircut, darling. I’m guessing the Klingons didn’t have a barber on that ship, and I know how much you hate looking scruffy.”

Marta thrashed, and Jett shot up with alarm.

“Hugh!” she shouted, and the doctor came running over.

“This is normal,” he said before he even reached the bed. “It’s a side effect of the sedative, she’ll come out of it in a minute.”

Jett appreciated his reassurance, but she was more comforted to see him run a full check of Marta’s vitals without finding anything out of the ordinary.

“I’ll give you some privacy,” Hugh said, giving Jett’s shoulder a friendly squeeze as he left them alone.

Jett studied her wife, trying to re-memorize everything she had started to forget.

“I love how, when you frown, it’s a little bit lopsided,” she whispered, tucking that bit of information away in the back of her mind, just in case. “I love that you curl up around the blankets when you sleep. I love the way you –”

Marta’s eyes snapped open.

“Jett!” she rasped, lurching sideways and grabbing onto her wife as though she couldn’t quite believe she was there.

The second she heard her wife’s voice – her real voice, not a recording, but actually talking to her – Jett felt herself tear up.

After a second, Marta relaxed her grip a little and lay back down, burrowing her head into the pillow.

“Sorry, bad dream,” she mumbled, stroking Jett’s cheek. “I was on a Klingon ship, and then –”

Marta stopped, frozen.

“You’re crying,” she said, feeling the tear tracks against her hand. “Jett, honey, what’s wrong?”

Jett shook her head, trying to find the words.

“You’re here,” she said, holding her wife’s hand even tighter in her own. “I can’t believe it. I just – I can’t believe it, but you’re here, and I think this might be real. God, I hope this is real.”

Marta furrowed her brow, concerned.

“Why wouldn’t this be real?” she asked gently. “Of course I’m…”

She trailed off, finally taking her eyes off her wife for long enough to notice their surroundings.

“Where are we?” she asked as she began to sit up.

Jett pressed two fingers against her wife’s arm, silently asking her to stay beside her, at least for now.

“Marta, you really were a prisoner on a Klingon ship,” she explained.

“The _BaS ‘elth_ ,” Marta supplied, adding a bitter twist to the words. “That happened? But then –”

“They’d put you all in cryotubes – probably so they wouldn’t have to worry about you plotting when they weren’t trying to get information out of you,” Jett said, shuddering at the thought of what her wife had gone through. “And then they lost their life support while they were still cloaked, so there was no one left to wake you up, and no one knew the ship was there. You drifted.”

“But that officer, that woman, she said…” Marta pursed her lips as she thought – another memory for Jett to file away. “Nine hundred years?”

“Nine hundred and thirty,” Jett corrected, giving her hand a gentle squeeze. “We took a shortcut.”

Jett watched, adoringly, as Marta’s face flickered with all the questions she had left to ask.

“Did you know?” was the first one Marta settled on. “Were you looking for me?”

Jett shook her head.

“They told me you’d been killed in action a little over a year ago,” she said, holding her wife a little closer against the memory. “I didn’t know there was anything to look for – we just got lucky.”

Jett looked over and saw her wife was crying too.

“Hey, it’s okay,” she said, trying to sit up even though the ache in her side told her that was probably a bad idea. “We’re both here now, right?”

“But you thought I was dead,” she said, reflexively taking Jett’s hand and curling it around her wrist at the pulse-point. “When they told us we were in the future, and I thought I was never going to see you again…”

Her face went blank with the memory of that grief, and it broke Jett’s heart to see.

“I’ve missed you,” the engineer said earnestly.

Marta gave her a funny look.

“Then why are you smiling?” she asked.

“ _Missed_ ,” Jett repeated instantly. “Past tense. I love the past tense.”

And now Marta was smiling too, and it was the most beautiful thing Jett had ever seen.

“I always knew you’d start loving linguistics someday,” she teased, incredibly gently.

Jett hummed in agreement, then thought about everything that had happened to bring her to this place, and this miracle.

“Have you heard of any planets with eight suns?” she asked.

Marta laughed at her apparent non-sequitur.

“No, how come?” she asked, leaning up on one elbow.

Jett dared to close her eyes, remembering the image that the time crystal had shown her - her and Marta racing between the sunrises so they could stand under the light of every single one.

And when she opened her eyes, Marta was still there. Maybe this really was real.

“Because we should find one, and we should go,” Jett said. “Our next shore leave. It’ll be perfect. And I’ll take you to museums -”

“You hate museums,” Marta interrupted.

“I don’t _hate_ them,” Jett said. “And I love you. And I want to.”

She could still picture how Marta had smiled in those time crystal visions of the two of them wandering through a portrait gallery, and she was thrilled beyond words to know that she would get to see those smiles in real life someday. 

“And we’ll talk…”

She trailed off, thinking of all the fragments of conversation the crystal had dug out of her future – too many to remember now, but she couldn’t wait to live them all. And to think that she had almost missed all this.

“What about?” Marta asked.

Now it was Jett’s turn to laugh.

“I don’t think it matters,” she said. “We’ll figure it out. We’ve got the rest of our lives.”

* * *

END.


End file.
